October 10, 1949…The First Ever Network Color Broadcast Airs
The cameras you see here are what RCA referred to (this first color camera design) as the Princeton Cameras, as they were designed and built at the RCA Laboratory in Princeton NJ.
In the rare photo above, we see singer Gladys Swarthout, performing for the dignitaries during the color test, just before “KFO” was scheduled to air on October 10, regardless what the back note says.
Below is the special half hour color presentation of the broadcast as captured on kinescope in New York. The notes on the video are good too if you click the watch on youtube button at the lower left corner.
On this day in 1949, NBC broadcast “Kukla, Fran & Ollie”, live and in color from their Washington DC studio at The Wardman Park Hotel.
The 15 minute show was usually done in Chicago, and in black and white, but RCA had brought them to town for a week of experimental demonstrations to congress and the FCC. That week, each day was filled with short color demonstrations that included all kinds of on-camera talent in the closed circuit broadcasts.
The only people that would have been able to see it in color were there, and at RCA Princeton, but not a single comment was ever received from the viewing public about the color image broadcast to their home sets, which certainly goes a long way in proving the system’s “compatibility”.
Steve, those cameras were unique prototype experimental color cameras. Only 3 were built using this design. What made them unique was their use of 3 separate imaging lenses, 1 for each color channel. This meant that the cameras used a single focal length for all 3 color channels which could not be easily changed. This design also complicated simple focusing as all 3 channels had to have their focus adjustments linked and tracked together, which is not easy.
Since then, all color cameras that use separate RGB color tubes use a single lens and the image is passed through dichroic prisms to separate the red, green, and blue components for further processing.