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Bright Signals: A History of Color Television
First demonstrated in 1928, color television remained little more than a novelty for decades as the industry struggled with the considerable technical, regulatory, commercial, and cultural complications posed by the medium. Only fully adopted by all three networks in the 1960s, color television was imagined as a new way of seeing that was distinct from both monochrome television and other forms of color media. It also inspired compelling popular, scientific, and industry conversations about the use and meaning of color and its effects on emotions, vision, and desire. In Bright Signals Susan Murray traces these wide-ranging debates within and beyond the television industry, positioning the story of color television, which was replete with false starts, failure, and ingenuity, as central to the broader history of twentieth-century visual culture. In so doing, she shows how color television disrupted and reframed the very idea of television while it simultaneously revealed the tensions about technology's relationship to consumerism, human sight, and the natural world.
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Bright Signals: A History of Color Television
First demonstrated in 1928, color television remained little more than a novelty for decades as the industry struggled with the considerable technical, regulatory, commercial, and cultural complications posed by the medium. Only fully adopted by all three networks in the 1960s, color television was imagined as a new way of seeing that was distinct from both monochrome television and other forms of color media. It also inspired compelling popular, scientific, and industry conversations about the use and meaning of color and its effects on emotions, vision, and desire. In Bright Signals Susan Murray traces these wide-ranging debates within and beyond the television industry, positioning the story of color television, which was replete with false starts, failure, and ingenuity, as central to the broader history of twentieth-century visual culture. In so doing, she shows how color television disrupted and reframed the very idea of television while it simultaneously revealed the tensions about technology's relationship to consumerism, human sight, and the natural world.
First demonstrated in 1928, color television remained little more than a novelty for decades as the industry struggled with the considerable technical, regulatory, commercial, and cultural complications posed by the medium. Only fully adopted by all three networks in the 1960s, color television was imagined as a new way of seeing that was distinct from both monochrome television and other forms of color media. It also inspired compelling popular, scientific, and industry conversations about the use and meaning of color and its effects on emotions, vision, and desire. In Bright Signals Susan Murray traces these wide-ranging debates within and beyond the television industry, positioning the story of color television, which was replete with false starts, failure, and ingenuity, as central to the broader history of twentieth-century visual culture. In so doing, she shows how color television disrupted and reframed the very idea of television while it simultaneously revealed the tensions about technology's relationship to consumerism, human sight, and the natural world.
Susan Murray is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, the author of Hitch Your Antenna to the Stars: Early Television and Broadcast Stardom, and the coeditor of Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. "And Now—Color": Early Color Systems 11 2. Natural Vision Versus "Tele-Vision": Defining and Standardizing Color 34 3. Color Adjustments: Experiments, Calibrations, and Color Training, 1950–1955 86 4. Colortown, USA: Expansion, Stabilization, and Promotion, 1955–1959 127 5. The Wonderful World of Color: Network Programming and the Spectacular Real, 1960–1965 176 6. At the End of the Rainbow: Global Expansion, the Space Race, and the Cold War 217 Conclusion 251 Notes 259 Bibliography 293 Index 303
What People are Saying About This
Susan J. Douglas
“What a terrific, innovative book! In this pioneering study of the development of color television, Susan Murray brilliantly intertwines the technological evolution of the device with prevailing notions about how people perceive color and its affective impact on our subjectivity and how we view the world. Murray breaks new ground by tracing how an understanding of the human eye was built into the technology from the very start. Highly original, engaging, and, yes, eye-opening.”
MP3: The Meaning of a Format - Jonathan Sterne
“In Bright Signals Susan Murray tells a critical and previously untold story in the history of television—the advent of color television—and does so in an innovative way that will disrupt established theories of visual culture, media historiography, the cultural analysis of standards, and television-as-technology.”
