a personal vendetta and escalated into a full-fledged media battle between CBS and RCA, and, more precisely, between the principal contenders, Goldmark and Sarnoff. To determine which system should be licensed for public sale, the FCC held a test in 1950 that resulted in a clear Goldmark victory. His color transmission was superb, while the RCA demonstration looked, as Newsweek put it, "like a crazed Van Gogh." Sarnoff ruefully admitted, "The monkeys were green. The bananas were blue, and everybody had a good laugh." Variety headlined its report: "RCA Lays Colored Egg." The FCC granted CBS a license and a monopoly to manufacture color TV sets. Before it could get started, however, an infuriated Sarnoff took CBS and the FCC to court, arguing that the public would be cheated by a mechanical contraption that was expensive and incompatible with blackand-white. Sarnoff lost again and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which confirmed the lower court's decision. But this setback only goaded Sarnoff into redoubling his efforts to disparage the mechanical system, and he drove his engineers and scientists to work nonstop for a breakthrough that would establish the merits of electronic color. One engineer called it "invention on demand." Sarnoff offered as much as $10,000 in bonuses to the engineer who moved the project forward. It is said that he spent about $150 million before he was through. But out of it came the system that grew into today's standard for all color television. The RCA all-electronic system provided reliable color that was compatible with the growing number of black-andwhite sets and therefore required no additional purchase by the set owner, something the Goldmark system couldn't do. "The mechanical system now belongs to the ages," chortled Sarnoff after a definitive test in 1952. Goldmark was indeed defeated, and in retrospect it was inevitable, given the advantages of an all-electronic system and Sarnoff's unexpected fanatical drive to
magnetic tape. CBS was developing a miniature film system known as electronic video recording. RCA thought the Selectavision system would be simpler, more reliable and less expensive than the other video players. This time RCA was wrong. Despite its technical achievement involving the storage and retrieval of billions of pieces of information on a single disk, the company completely misread the times and the competition. By the time RCA introduced Selectavision in 1981, the Japanese had marketed their VCRs, The story of the invention of color which were selling in millions of units, even at higher prices. The key television stars a turkey that turned to the RCA failure was the expaninto a swan. RCA was originally the sion of videotape rentals, which loser, but CEO David Sarnoff's made programs available on a mass determination to beat the competition scale to the consumer. Before RCA resulted in the all-electronic system knew it, its clever system was comthat became an industry standard. pletely bypassed because of its error in assuming that lower prices, rather than appealing features, were achieve it. But before the mechanical the key to success. RCA pulled out of the system was tossed aside as television's video-player business in 1984. The folgreatest technoturkey, the indefatigable lowing year, the company was swallowed Goldmark salvaged a smaller version of up by General Electric, the company that his mechanical system to be used by as- had originally created it. Can technoturkeys be avoided? Probtronauts in transmitting pictures from space. He also forced RCA to come to ably not, given the human penchant for CBS to license the special shadow-mask pursuing the wrong target and then stubbornly defending the error. But technotube invented by CBS that made electurkeys, as history shows, are hardly all tronic color feasible. bad. They often point the way to new Ironically, RCA fathered its own techno turkey when it produced the products, open new research paths and Selectavision laser disk, which tried to do sometimes inspire others to move an ento the VCR and other video players what tire field or a company in a new direction all-electronic compatible TV had done to that ultimately brings success. Einstein's Goldmark's color system. RCA spent 15 refrigerator concept, for instance, found a years developing the laser disk in an at- use in the nuclear breeder reactor, and Goldmark's ungainly TV was sharpened tempt to restore the leadership in consumer electronics that the company had lost after and miniaturized into a tool for teaching a failed effort to enter the computer busi- student surgeons in operating rooms and ness and Sarnoff's death in 1971. for astronauts to study phenomena in space. To err is human, certainly, but our The object of the video-player system errors may be salvaged by the law of un inwas to allow the consumer to play his own programs at will and not to depend on the tended consequences. 0 television studio. During the 1970s, the Japanese were working on the VHS and About the Author: Lee Edson is a freelance Betamax systems, the two incarnations of science and technology writer based in Stamford, Connecticut. the VCR, which played back images from