First Airborne Color
First Airborne Color and First Live Use Of Color Video Tape
There are several elements to this story, so let’s start with the mystery of the camera itself. Yesterday our friend Lytle Hoover, of RCA’s Broadcast Division in Camden, sent the photo on the left to several television camera collectors. We were trying to identify the RCA color camera in the helicopter and after a few back and forths, Lytle found the rare photo on the right. The right photo is of an early version of the RCA color medical camera and is probably the prototype and probably built in late 1956. In late 1957, several units of the final design were in use at teaching hospitals. Those color medical cameras looked like large TK11s, complete with the side handles but no viewfinders. They were called RCA TK45s but are not to be confused the the TK45A studio camera that came along in 1973. Now, on the next part…where it was used. Newspaper reports describing the upcoming color coverage of the 1958 Rose Parade by NBC mentioned a color camera that would broadcast overhead shots from a helicopter. An aerial color shot would be a first. The other fist was the use of color video tape for the first time in a live broadcast. Now, judges pick the winning floats before hand, but back then, the judges voted on the best floats as they came by the reviewing stand. NBC taped the parades floats so they would be able to play back images of the winners after the parade when the judges made their awards.
I always enjoy the weirder cameras Bobby digs up. So that led me over to the RCA Broadcast News section over at American Radio History. The TK-45 even found use at SAC’s air command center: http://www.americanradiohistory.com/hd2/Archive-RCA-Broadcast-News-IDX/search.cgi?zoom_sort=0&zoom_xml=0&zoom_query=tk+45&zoom_cat%5B%5D=2&zoom_per_page=10 (you can filter out the TK-45A results by selecting ‘1950’s’)
The helicopter is a Bell 47J built in 1957 and owned out of Palm City, FL about 100 miles N of Miami for all its life. I found the name of the owner in FL but his phone is disconnected. Last record shows he is 81. Registration shows an airworthiness certificate in 1978 and the “last action taken” in 2006. Not sure what that would have been. So now, what was it shooting in Florida?
CBS also used their color camera system for medical training. I have seen pictures of that some place…
The more things change, the more they stay the same: I think the Media 100 NLE system was developed for medical schools. That’s what I remember at the time, but I can’t find a good history of it on the web.
The camera head in the helicopter looks a little different from the TK45 medical camera I found in this link. Maybe it is a later version: http://www.oldradio.com/archives/hardware/TV/tk45(1960).jpg