New York Beams the First Color TV Picture

On June 27, 1929, engineers at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City switched on a bank of spinning scan disks, glow tubes, and color filters and sent the country's first color television pictures down the line. Herbert E. Ives, the physicist who ran Bell's electro-optical research, led the team; the picture, a bouquet of roses and an American flag in full color, was carried from New York to an audience in Washington, D.C. The system was entirely mechanical: three separate rigs of photoelectric cells and filters captured red, green, and blue light at the sending end, then a set of mirrors stacked the three colors back into one image at the receiving end. It worked, but it was dim, flickery, and nowhere near ready for a living room. Color television would sit in the lab for another two decades before anyone could actually buy a set.