"Do You See Colour on Your TV?"

  

"Do you see colour on your TV?" I probably wasn't even watching TV when I heard this, since I was looking down and making mice out of plasticene or cutting up cardboard boxes with a steak knife to make houses for my trolls - but I did finally look up, and on our rinky-dinky standard-issue black and white TV, there was a sort of Hawaiian scene - was it Hawaiian, or something else? Do I really remember palm trees blowing? - and all around it was a sort of frame, and the frame was "strobing" (that word didn't exist back then, so let's say it was flashing weirdly). And the announcer was asking us if we SAW COLOUR on our black and white TV, and I sat and looked at it - I don't even remember if I saw any colour, but if I did it was tiny iridescent bits and pieces - and then I forgot about it, almost. I think I remember saying something to my mother about it, but she was skeptical. 

This would have been on Detroit TV in the mid-to-late 1960s. WJBK, probably, the same channel where I watched Milky the Clown, Captain Jolly, Jingles and Poopdeck Paul.

Then the whole thing got stashed WAY in the back of the cluttered attic of my mind. 

Something twigged the memory, some lone synapse sputtering in the desert of time, and I started thinking about it again. Now, when you're thinking about anything, or trying to net a memory that wisps away from you like dissipating smoke, you can always google it, and nine times out of ten at least SOMETHING comes up. Or it doesn't.

In this case, "do you see colour on your TV"? didn't come up at all, but after a lot more dredging, a couple of things did, or at least obliquely. These are comments left on various science pages in which someone attempts to start a discussion, which doesn't go very far. In some of these comments there is a sort of  dubiousness, a sense of "maybe I dreamed it" or "we all imagine things", which makes the whole thing much more intriguing. 

But the Squirt commercial referenced below is actually a documented thing, which is the closest thing to proof I'm ever going to have that yes, somebody DID once manage to broadcast colour images on black and white TV. I have attempted to recreate the magic of seeing colour where there should be only black and white by using different text colours for each comment. Thrilling, eh?

Anyone remember experimental color images on black & white TV?

Topics: How to make a Black and White television show color

Something happened that reminded me of this tonight, and I think I have finally made sense of something seen as a kid. For some odd reason it just hit me. When I was fairly young and living in the Los Angeles area, there was a test done one night on a local TV channel that was supposed to produce a color picture on the black and white TVs commonly in use. And I can recall seeing some color; I think mostly green.

From time to time I have thought about this and wondered what it was that I saw. In fact at times I have doubted the memory as it didn't make any sense, but I can remember the event very clearly. Tonight it occurred to me what they were probably up to. I bet that they were strobing the white to produce a false color image, as is done with alternating black and white dots on a rotating wheel [I don't recall the name of the effect].

The idea is that each pixel on the screen would be strobed at the frequency required to produce the desired color for that dot. Does this make sense? I'm not sure what the strobe rate is that produces the false color effect, or if this was doable on B&W televisions, but it is the only thing that has even threatened to make any sense here. Is there any other way that one can imagine producing color on a B&W screen?

I believe the imagination can sometimes fill in things like this, causing us to believe we saw something that wasn't exactly there. But I'm not saying that it didn't actually happen either.

I can remember seeing a similar demo in the UK in about 1970 - most likely on the "Tommorow's World" weekly science program. I think they said it was done by modulating the intensity, but I don't remember any more details. It was a test image with a few large areas of different colours (which were very faint), not an attempt to show a "realistic" moving colour image. If you want to experiment, all you need is a PC and some free software that can generate a movie from frame-by-frame images.

I don't know what prompted me to remember this. Crazy.

When I was a kid we lived the Los Angeles area. We had a (POS) Packard Bell black & white TV in the family room (color TVs were new technology and my parents were skeptical).

One day a Sprite commercial came on and the voiceover said something to the effect of "Sprite is so bursting with flavor that you're probably seeing color on your B&W TV!". I remember scrambling over to the TV, and sure enough, there was a static image of a Sprite bottle, and it was kind of in color.

This is apparently an approximation of what some viewers saw, although I only remember seeing a pale green and possibly red.

One of the earliest test broadcasts of this technology was in 1967 or 1968 on KNXT Channel 2 in Los Angeles.

The Squirt Soft Drink Subjective Color Acid Test

On July 25, 1967, television viewers with black-and-white TV sets were startled to see flashes of color on their monochrome screens for about ten seconds during a 60-second soda-pop commercial. A letter to a columnist in the September 14, 1967 Detroit Free Press asked, "Before I see an eye doctor, let me ask Action Line: Is it possible to pick up color TV on a black and white set? I SWEAR I saw a Squirt soft-drink commercial in color. Not pink elephants Green Squirt!" The image was described in the newspaper column as a red, green and blue sign that had flashed on the screen.

A viewer in Chicago told Popular Photography magazine (July 1968), "I saw pink! It knocked me for a loop...the letters S-Q-U-I-R-T looked greenish or light turquoise...and it kept up for maybe 10 seconds." (Meanwhile a viewer in San Francisco claimed he didn't see anything colorful.)

It was the national debut of an experimental television commercial using a special production process that would give the optical illusion of color. The commercial first aired a few months earlier locally on KNXT, the CBS-owned television station in Los Angeles, and viewers there were just as stunned. Squirt and its advertising partner Color-Tel Corporation of Los Angeles, at the time decided to make no prior announcement of this experimental commercial, preferring to see just how viewers would respond. And respond they did. Within hours, thousands of viewers were asking if they really saw what they thought they did, color on their black-and-white TV screens, according to Popular Electronics magazine (October 1968).

ADDENDA! I found more stuff on this weird subject, to my surprise, but it was such a long piece that I only include a few excerpts here. And it does explain why so few people remember this arcane experiment, or if they do, question the veracity of those memories. The color-on-a-black-and-white-TV experiment was extremely brief, due to the fact that it FLOPPED. Had it come along ten years earlier, maybe. Like Segway, which was supposed to revolutionize transportation as we knew it - it didn't. It didn't revolutionize ANYTHING, and just made a few people (such as myself) doubt their own memories or even feel crazy for having them.

There were a few drawbacks. The images were nothing at all like true color TV. It didn't have the intensity or range of colors. As the technology currently stood, the effect could only be used on still images. The "subjective color" could only be seen in about one-fourth of the TV screen area, and, because it relied on flickering light, there was a lot of flickering. It was also found that some people could not perceive the colors at all, yet some people diagnosed as color-blind could see the colors.

Nonetheless, Popular Science, in its August 1968 issue, saw many possibilities for the technology, particularly for special effects. "Color will appear in cartoons, commercials and special presentations. Polka-dots on a clown's suit will be seen as red flashing dots. You'll see the designs and lettering on a cereal box in pulsating green and blue. A girl will plant a kiss on a boy's cheek--and a red lipstick print will appear on your screen."

But there was one giant flaw in that rosy prediction. By 1968, black-and-white TV was well on the way out. The vast majority of programming (outside of old movies and TV shows) were being broadcast in "living" color by then, and while most U.S. households still had black-and-white TV sets (color sets were big, bulky and expensive in those days), more and more homes were purchasing color television sets every year. Had James F. Butterfield perfected the process ten or fifteen years earlier, in the 1950s when 90 percent of television broadcasts were black and white, it might have had more of a serious impact.

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