Color television

The invention: 



System for broadcasting full-color images over the

airwaves.



The people behind the invention:



Peter Carl Goldmark (1906-1977), the head of the CBS research

and development laboratory

William S. Paley (1901-1990), the businessman who took over

CBS

David Sarnoff (1891-1971), the founder of RCA










The Race for Standardization



Although by 1928 color television had already been demonstrated

in Scotland, two events in 1940 mark that year as the beginning

of color television. First, on February 12, 1940, the Radio Corporation

of America (RCA) demonstrated its color television system

privately to a group that included members of the Federal Communications

Commission (FCC), an administrative body that had the

authority to set standards for an electronic color system. The demonstration

did not go well; indeed, David Sarnoff, the head of RCA,

canceled a planned public demonstration and returned his engineers

to the Princeton, New Jersey, headquarters of RCA’s laboratories.

Next, on September 1, 1940, the Columbia Broadcasting System

(CBS) took the first step to develop a color system that would become

the standard for the United States. On that day, CBS demonstrated

color television to the public, based on the research of an engineer,

Peter Carl Goldmark. Goldmark placed a set of spinning

filters in front of the black-and-white television images, breaking

them down into three primary colors and producing color television.

The audience saw what was called “additive color.”

Although Goldmark had been a researcher at CBS since January,

1936, he did not attempt to develop a color television system until

March, 1940, after watching the Technicolor motion picture Gone

with the Wind (1939). Inspired, Goldmark began to tinker in his tiny

CBS laboratory in the headquarters building in New York City.

If a decision had been made in 1940, the CBS color standard

would have been accepted as the national standard. The FCC was,

at that time, more concerned with trying to establish a black-andwhite

standard for television. Color television seemed decades away.

In 1941, the FCC decided to adopt standards for black-and-white

television only, leaving the issue of color unresolved—and the

doors to the future of color broadcasting wide open. Control of a potentially

lucrative market as well as personal rivalry threwWilliam

S. Paley, the head of CBS, and Sarnoff into a race for the control of

color television. Both companies would pay dearly in terms of

money and time, but it would take until the 1960’s before the United

States would become a nation of color television watchers.

RCA was at the time the acknowledged leader in the development

of black-and-white television. CBS engineers soon discovered,

however, that their company’s color system would not work when

combined with RCA black-and-white televisions. In other words,

customers would need one set for black-and-white and one for

color. Moreover, since the color system of CBS needed more broadcast

frequency space than the black-and-white system in use, CBS

was forced to ask the FCC to allocate new channel space in the

ultrahigh frequency (UHF) band, which was then not being used. In

contrast, RCA scientists labored to make a compatible color system

that required no additional frequency space.





No Time to Wait



Following the end of World War II, in 1945, the suburbanites who

populated new communities in America’s cities wanted television sets

right away; they did not want to wait for the government to decide on

a color standard and then wait again while manufacturers redesigned

assembly lines to make color sets. Rich with savings accumulated during

the prosperity of the war years, Americans wanted to spend their

money. After the war, the FCC saw no reason to open up proceedings

regarding color systems. Black-and-white was operational; customers

were waiting in line for the new electronic marvel. To give its engineers

time to create a compatible color system, RCA skillfully lobbied the

members of the FCC to take no action.

There were other problems with the CBS mechanical color television.

It was noisy and large, and its color balance was hard to maintain.

CBS claimed that through further engineering work, it would

improve the actual sets. Yet RCA was able to convince other manufacturers

to support it in preference to CBS principally because of its

proven manufacturing track record.

In 1946, RCA demonstrated a new electronic color receiver with

three picture tubes, one for each of the primary colors. Color reproduction

was fairly true; although any movement on the screen

caused color blurring, there was little flicker. It worked, however,

and thus ended the invention phase of color television begun in

1940. The race for standardization would require seven more years

of corporate struggle before the RCA system would finally win

adoption as the national standard in 1953.



Impact





Through the 1950’s, black-and-white television remained the order

of the day. Through the later years of the decade, only the National

Broadcasting Company (NBC) television network was regularly

airing programs in color. Full production and presentation of

shows in color during prime time did not come until the mid-1960’s;

most industry observers date 1972 as the true arrival of color television.

By 1972, color sets were found in more than half the homes in the

United States. At that point, since color was so widespread, TV

Guide stopped tagging color program listings with a special symbol

and instead tagged only black-and-white shows, as it does to this

day. Gradually, only cheap, portable sets were made for black-andwhite

viewing, while color sets came in all varieties from tiny handheld

pocket televisions to mammoth projection televisions.



See also :



Autochrome plate; Community antenna television;

Communications satellite; Fiber-optics; FM radio; Radio; Television;

Color film

The invention:Aphotographic medium used to take full-color pictures.
The people behind the invention:
Rudolf Fischer (1881-1957), a German chemist
H. Siegrist (1885-1959), a German chemist and Fischer’s
collaborator
Benno Homolka (1877-1949), a German chemist
The Process Begins
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Arthur-Louis Ducos du
Hauron, a French chemist and physicist, proposed a tripack (threelayer)
process of film development in which three color negatives
would be taken by means of superimposed films. This was a subtractive
process. (In the “additive method” of making color pictures,
the three colors are added in projection—that is, the colors are formed
by the mixture of colored light of the three primary hues. In the
“subtractive method,” the colors are produced by the superposition
of prints.) In Ducos du Hauron’s process, the blue-light negative
would be taken on the top film of the pack; a yellow filter below it
would transmit the yellow light, which would reach a green-sensitive
film and then fall upon the bottom of the pack, which would be sensitive
to red light. Tripacks of this type were unsatisfactory, however,
because the light became diffused in passing through the emulsion
layers, so the green and red negatives were not sharp.
To obtain the real advantage of a tripack, the three layers must
be coated one over the other so that the distance between the bluesensitive
and red-sensitive layers is a small fraction of a thousandth
of an inch. Tripacks of this type were suggested by the early pioneers
of color photography, who had the idea that the packs would
be separated into three layers for development and printing. The
manipulation of such systems proved to be very difficult in practice.
It was also suggested, however, that it might be possible to develop
such tripacks as a unit and then, by chemical treatment, convert the
silver images into dye images.Fischer’s Theory
One of the earliest subtractive tripack methods that seemed to
hold great promise was that suggested by Rudolf Fischer in 1912. He
proposed a tripack that would be made by coating three emulsions
on top of one another; the lowest one would be red-sensitive, the
middle one would be green-sensitive, and the top one would be bluesensitive.
Chemical substances called “couplers,” which would produce
dyes in the development process, would be incorporated into
the layers. In this method, the molecules of the developing agent, after
becoming oxidized by developing the silver image, would react
with the unoxidized form (the coupler) to produce the dye image.
The two types of developing agents described by Fischer are
paraminophenol and paraphenylenediamine (or their derivatives).
The five types of dye that Fischer discovered are formed when silver
images are developed by these two developing agents in the presence
of suitable couplers. The five classes of dye he used (indophenols,
indoanilines, indamines, indothiophenols, and azomethines)
were already known when Fischer did his work, but it was he who
discovered that the photographic latent image could be used to promote
their formulation from “coupler” and “developing agent.”
The indoaniline and azomethine types have been found to possess
the necessary properties, but the other three suffer from serious defects.
Because only p-phenylenediamine and its derivatives can be
used to form the indoaniline and azomethine dyes, it has become
the most widely used color developing agent.Impact
In the early 1920’s, Leopold Mannes and Leopold Godowsky
made a great advance beyond the Fischer process. Working on a
new process of color photography, they adopted coupler development,
but instead of putting couplers into the emulsion as Fischer
had, they introduced them during processing. Finally, in 1935, the
film was placed on the market under the name “Kodachrome,” a
name that had been used for an early two-color process.
The first use of the new Kodachrome process in 1935 was for 16-
millimeter film. Color motion pictures could be made by the Kodachrome process as easily as black-and-white pictures, because the
complex work involved (the color development of the film) was
done under precise technical control. The definition (quality of the
image) given by the process was soon sufficient to make it practical
for 8-millimeter pictures, and in 1936, Kodachrome film was introduced
in a 35-millimeter size for use in popular miniature cameras.
Soon thereafter, color processes were developed on a larger scale
and new color materials were rapidly introduced. In 1940, the Kodak
Research Laboratories worked out a modification of the Fischer
process in which the couplers were put into the emulsion layers.
These couplers are not dissolved in the gelatin layer itself, as the
Fischer couplers are, but are carried in small particles of an oily material
that dissolves the couplers, protects them from the gelatin,
and protects the silver bromide from any interaction with the couplers.
When development takes place, the oxidation product of the
developing agent penetrates into the organic particles and reacts
with the couplers so that the dyes are formed in small particles that
are dispersed throughout the layers. In one form of this material,
Ektachrome (originally intended for use in aerial photography), the
film is reversed to produce a color positive. It is first developed with
a black-and-white developer, then reexposed and developed with a
color developer that recombines with the couplers in each layer to
produce the appropriate dyes, all three of which are produced simultaneously
in one development.
In summary, although Fischer did not succeed in putting his theory
into practice, his work still forms the basis of most modern color
photographic systems. Not only did he demonstrate the general
principle of dye-coupling development, but the art is still mainly
confined to one of the two types of developing agent, and two of the
five types of dye, described by him.

COBOL computer language

The invention: The first user-friendly computer programming language,
COBOL was originally designed to solve ballistics problems.
The people behind the invention:
Grace Murray Hopper (1906-1992), an American
mathematician
Howard Hathaway Aiken (1900-1973), an American
mathematician
Plain Speaking
Grace Murray Hopper, a mathematician, was a faculty member
at Vassar College when World War II (1939-1945) began. She enlisted
in the Navy and in 1943 was assigned to the Bureau of Ordnance
Computation Project, where she worked on ballistics problems.
In 1944, the Navy began using one of the first electronic
computers, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC),
designed by an International Business Machines (IBM) Corporation
team of engineers headed by Howard Hathaway Aiken, to solve
ballistics problems. Hopper became the third programmer of the
ASCC.
Hopper’s interest in computer programming continued after
the war ended. By the early 1950’s, Hopper’s work with programming
languages had led to her development of FLOW-MATIC, the
first English-language data processing compiler. Hopper’s work
on FLOW-MATIC paved the way for her later work with COBOL
(Common Business Oriented Language).
Until Hopper developed FLOW-MATIC, digital computer programming
was all machine-specific and was written in machine
code. A program designed for one computer could not be used on
another. Every program was both machine-specific and problemspecific
in that the programmer would be told what problem the
machine was going to be asked and then would write a completely
new program for that specific problem in the machine code.Machine code was based on the programmer’s knowledge of the
physical characteristics of the computer as well as the requirements of
the problem to be solved; that is, the programmer had to know what
was happening within the machine as it worked through a series of calculations, which relays tripped when and in what order, and what
mathematical operations were necessary to solve the problem. Programming
was therefore a highly specialized skill requiring a unique
combination of linguistic, reasoning, engineering, and mathematical
abilities that not even all the mathematicians and electrical engineers
who designed and built the early computers possessed.
While every computer still operates in response to the programming,
or instructions, built into it, which are formatted in machine
code, modern computers can accept programs written in nonmachine
code—that is, in various automatic programming languages. They
are able to accept nonmachine code programs because specialized
programs now exist to translate those programs into the appropriate
machine code. These translating programs are known as “compilers,”
or “assemblers,” andFLOW-MATIC was the first such program.
Hopper developed FLOW-MATIC after realizing that it would
be necessary to eliminate unnecessary steps in programming to
make computers more efficient. FLOW-MATIC was based, in part,
on Hopper’s recognition that certain elements, or commands, were
common to many different programming applications. Hopper theorized
that it would not be necessary to write a lengthy series of instructions
in machine code to instruct a computer to begin a series of
operations; instead, she believed that it would be possible to develop
commands in an assembly language in such a way that a programmer
could write one command, such as the word add, that
would translate into a sequence of several commands in machine
code. Hopper’s successful development of a compiler to translate
programming languages into machine code thus meant that programming
became faster and easier. From assembly languages such
asFLOW-MATIC, it was a logical progression to the development of
high-level computer languages, such as FORTRAN (Formula Translation)
and COBOL.The Language of Business
Between 1955 (when FLOW-MATIC was introduced) and 1959, a
number of attempts at developing a specific business-oriented language
were made. IBM and Remington Rand believed that the only
way to market computers to the business community was through the development of a language that business people would be
comfortable using. Remington Rand officials were especially committed
to providing a language that resembled English. None of
the attempts to develop a business-oriented language succeeded,
however, and by 1959 Hopper and other members of the U.S. Department
of Defense had persuaded representatives of various companies
of the need to cooperate.
On May 28 and 29, 1959, a conference sponsored by the Department
of Defense was held at the Pentagon to discuss the problem of
establishing a common language for the adaptation of electronic
computers for data processing. As a result, the first distribution of
COBOL was accomplished on December 17, 1959. Although many
people were involved in the development of COBOL, Hopper played
a particularly important role. She not only found solutions to technical
problems but also succeeded in selling the concept of a common
language from an administrative and managerial point of view. Hopper
recognized that while the companies involved in the commercial
development of computers were in competition with one another, the
use of a common, business-oriented language would contribute to
the growth of the computer industry as a whole, as well as simplify
the training of computer programmers and operators.
Consequences
COBOL was the first compiler developed for business data processing
operations. Its development simplified the training required
for computer users in business applications and demonstrated that
computers could be practical tools in government and industry as
well as in science. Prior to the development of COBOL, electronic
computers had been characterized as expensive, oversized adding
machines that were adequate for performing time-consuming mathematics
but lacked the flexibility that business people required.
In addition, the development of COBOL freed programmers not
only from the need to know machine code but also from the need to
understand the physical functioning of the computers they were using.
Programming languages could be written that were both machine-
independent and almost universally convertible from one
computer to another.Finally, because Hopper and the other committee members worked
under the auspices of the Department of Defense, the software
was not copyrighted, and in a short period of time COBOL became
widely available to anyone who wanted to use it. It diffused rapidly
throughout the industry and contributed to the widespread adaptation
of computers for use in countless settings.

Cloud seeding

The invention: Technique for inducing rainfall by distributing dry
ice or silver nitrate into reluctant rainclouds.
The people behind the invention:
Vincent Joseph Schaefer (1906-1993), an American chemist and
meteorologist
Irving Langmuir (1881-1957), an American physicist and
chemist who won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
Bernard Vonnegut (1914-1997), an American physical chemist
and meteorologist
Praying for Rain
Beginning in 1943, an intense interest in the study of clouds developed
into the practice of weather “modification.” Working for
the General Electric Research Laboratory, Nobel laureate Irving
Langmuir and his assistant researcher and technician, Vincent Joseph
Schaefer, began an intensive study of precipitation and its
causes.
Past research and study had indicated two possible ways that
clouds produce rain. The first possibility is called “coalescing,” a
process by which tiny droplets of water vapor in a cloud merge after
bumping into one another and become heavier and fatter until they
drop to earth. The second possibility is the “Bergeron process” of
droplet growth, named after the Swedish meteorologist Tor Bergeron.
Bergeron’s process relates to supercooled clouds, or clouds
that are at or below freezing temperatures and yet still contain both
ice crystals and liquid water droplets. The size of the water droplets
allows the droplets to remain liquid despite freezing temperatures;
while small droplets can remain liquid only down to 4 degrees Celsius,
larger droplets may not freeze until reaching -15 degrees
Celsius. Precipitation occurs when the ice crystals become heavy
enough to fall. If the temperature at some point below the cloud is
warm enough, it will melt the ice crystals before they reach the
earth, producing rain. If the temperature remains at the freezing point, the ice crystals retain their form and fall as snow.
Schaefer used a deep-freezing unit in order to observe water
droplets in pure cloud form. In order to observe the droplets better,
Schaefer lined the chest with black velvet and concentrated a beam
of light inside. The first agent he introduced inside the supercooled
freezer was his own breath. When that failed to form the desired ice
crystals, he proceeded to try other agents. His hope was to form ice
crystals that would then cause the moisture in the surrounding air
to condense into more ice crystals, which would produce a miniature
snowfall.
He eventually achieved success when he tossed a handful of dry
ice inside and was rewarded with the long-awaited snow. The
freezer was set at the freezing point of water, 0 degrees Celsius, but
not all the particles were ice crystals, so when the dry ice was introduced
all the stray water droplets froze instantly, producing ice
crystals, or snowflakes.
Planting the First Seeds
On November 13, 1946, Schaefer took to the air over Mount
Greylock with several pounds of dry ice in order to repeat the experiment
in nature. After he had finished sprinkling, or seeding, a
supercooled cloud, he instructed the pilot to fly underneath the
cloud he had just seeded. Schaefer was greeted by the sight of snow.
By the time it reached the ground, it had melted into the first-ever
human-made rainfall.
Independently of Schaefer and Langmuir, another General Electric
scientist, Bernard Vonnegut, was also seeking a way to cause
rain. He found that silver iodide crystals, which have the same size
and shape as ice crystals, could “fool” water droplets into condensing
on them. When a certain chemical mixture containing silver iodide
is heated on a special burner called a “generator,” silver iodide
crystals appear in the smoke of the mixture. Vonnegut’s discovery
allowed seeding to occur in a way very different from seeding with
dry ice, but with the same result. Using Vonnegut’s process, the
seeding is done from the ground. The generators are placed outside
and the chemicals are mixed. As the smoke wafts upward, it carries
the newly formed silver iodide crystals with it into the clouds.
The results of the scientific experiments by Langmuir, Vonnegut,
and Schaefer were alternately hailed and rejected as legitimate.
Critics argue that the process of seeding is too complex and
would have to require more than just the addition of dry ice or silver
nitrate in order to produce rain. One of the major problems surrounding
the question of weather modification by cloud seeding is
the scarcity of knowledge about the earth’s atmosphere. Ajourney
begun about fifty years ago is still a long way from being completed.
Impact
Although the actual statistical and other proofs needed to support
cloud seeding are lacking, the discovery in 1946 by the General
Electric employees set off a wave of interest and demand for information
that far surpassed the interest generated by the discovery of
nuclear fission shortly before. The possibility of ending drought
and, in the process, hunger excited many people. The discovery also
prompted both legitimate and false “rainmakers” who used the information
gathered by Schaefer, Langmuir, and Vonnegut to set up
cloud-seeding businesses.Weather modification, in its current stage
of development, cannot be used to end worldwide drought. It does,
however, have beneficial results in some cases on the crops of
smaller farms that have been affected by drought.
In order to understand the advances made in weather modification,
new instruments are needed to record accurately the results of
further experimentation. The storm of interest—both favorable and
nonfavorable—generated by the discoveries of Schaefer, Langmuir,
and Vonnegut has had and will continue to have far-reaching effects
on many aspects of society.