- Person
- Peter Carl Goldmark
- Lived
- 1906–1977
- Field
- Electrical engineering, recording and television
- From
- Hungarian-American
The story
Peter Carl Goldmark, a Hungarian-born Jewish engineer, joined CBS in New York in 1936. In 1940, after seeing the Technicolor film Gone with the Wind, he set out to give television color. Within months he had a system that placed a rapidly spinning disk of red, green and blue filters in front of the camera and a matching disk in front of the receiver. Each picture field was sent in one color, and the eye blended them into a full color image. CBS first demonstrated this field-sequential color system on August 29, 1940.
After the war the Federal Communications Commission adopted the CBS system as the American color standard on October 11, 1950, and CBS began regular color broadcasts in New York on June 25, 1951. But the system could not be received in black and white on the millions of sets already in homes without an adapter. Color broadcasts stopped in October 1951, when the government asked makers to halt color set production during the Korean War, and in December 1953 the FCC approved RCA's all-electronic system, which was compatible with existing sets. Goldmark's system lost the race for home television.
Its strengths, however, kept it alive. A single camera with a color wheel was much smaller, lighter and easier to run than the bulky three-tube studio cameras of the time. Goldmark's method found wide use in closed-circuit television for industry, schools and medical institutions, including color transmissions of surgical procedures.
In the late 1960s NASA turned to the same idea. Westinghouse built a color camera for the Apollo program based on a modified version of the CBS field-sequential system, and starting with Apollo 10 in May 1969, sequential color cameras flew on NASA's human spaceflight missions until the late 1980s, when solid-state cameras replaced them. The camera was adapted to broadcast from the lunar surface itself, so many of the color television pictures the world saw of astronauts on the Moon came through Goldmark's spinning wheel. Today many digital projectors still make color with a spinning color wheel, the same principle he demonstrated in 1940.
Why it matters
Goldmark's color wheel brought color television to medical teaching, schools and industry, carried Apollo's color pictures from space, and still lives on in many digital projectors.
About Peter Carl Goldmark
Budapest-born CBS engineer who led the creation of the long-playing (LP) record, letting people hear whole symphonies and albums at home, and pioneered color television.
More about Peter Carl Goldmark
Sources
- Field-sequential color system Wikipedia
- Peter Carl Goldmark Jewish Virtual Library
- Peter C. Goldmark National Inventors Hall of Fame
- Peter Carl Goldmark EBSCO Research Starters
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.