Color v. Black & White

CBS claimed another triumph last week: network color television had been tested and proved. Using the Bell System coaxial cable, CBS had broadcast a Technicolor movie short and color slides from Manhattan to Washington (225 miles) and return.

Since the first unveiling of CBS discoveries in the field of color (TIME, Feb. 11), rival networks and laboratories had voiced many a skeptical humph. According to them, color was a good five years off, and the best that television could do now was black & white. A fortnight ago, Allen B. Du Mont, pioneer television promoter, warned: “. . . color television for the home is … still in the far distant future.. . . The informed, sincere scientist is not convinced by dramatically staged and carefully controlled laboratory demonstrations. . . .”

But CBS continued to promote its enthusiastic plans for color. Result: at least one manufacturer (Zenith) stopped plans for black-&-white receivers; at least a score of television-station applications were withdrawn from FCC.

But whatever improvements might be in the offing, the actual fact was that even black & white still had its bugs and ghosts, and the best color was still confined to canned laboratory movies, not live broadcasts.