A musical family in Budapest
Peter Carl Goldmark was born in Budapest on December 2, 1906, the eldest child of Alexander Goldmark, a businessman, and Emma Steiner. In Hungarian he was Goldmark Péter Károly. He came from a family already known for talent. One great-uncle, Karl Goldmark, was among the most celebrated Hungarian composers of the nineteenth century, the author of the opera The Queen of Sheba. Another great-uncle, Joseph Goldmark, was a chemist and inventor who took part in the revolutions of 1848 and later emigrated to the United States.
Peter grew up in a home full of music. His mother was musical, and he learned both the piano and the cello as a child. The cello stayed with him for life, and his love of long, unbroken pieces of classical music would one day change how the whole world listened to recorded sound. But he was just as fascinated by machines. Engineers and musicians are often thought of as different kinds of people; Goldmark was always both at once, and the combination explains much of what he went on to build.
Vienna, physics and a first television
After his parents divorced, the boy moved with his mother to Vienna. There he set up a home laboratory in the family bathroom, built a radio telegraph receiver and became curious about the projectors used to show motion pictures. While still young he applied for his first patent, for a device that let a driver sound a car horn with his knee.
In 1925 he enrolled at the University of Vienna to study physics, and he also studied in Berlin. A year later he got hold of a primitive television kit sold by the Scottish pioneer John Logie Baird, whose machine produced a picture about the size of a postage stamp. Goldmark rebuilt and enlarged the screen, and from then on he was captivated by television, which was then a crude mechanical novelty. He completed his doctorate in physics at Vienna in 1931, with a thesis on a new method of measuring the speed of ions.
From England to CBS
With his doctorate in hand, Goldmark went to work as a television engineer for Pye Radio in Cambridge, England, one of the firms experimenting with the new medium. In 1933 he emigrated to the United States. For the next few years he worked as a consultant and engineer for various companies.
In 1936 he joined the Columbia Broadcasting System in New York as chief engineer of its new television department, and in 1937 he became an American citizen. CBS was then mainly a radio network, and Goldmark helped build its television operation from the ground up. During World War II he turned his skills to the war effort, developing electronic jammers that pilots used to confuse enemy radar, devices that were used during the Allied invasion of Normandy. Over the next three decades he rose to become head of research and development, a vice president of CBS from 1950, and finally president of CBS Laboratories, the company's research arm.
Color by spinning wheel
In 1940, on a trip to Montreal, Goldmark saw Gone with the Wind, one of the first major films shot in Technicolor. Television at the time was black and white, and he resolved to give it color. Within months he had a working system. It used a rapidly spinning disk of red, green and blue filters in front of the camera, matched by an identical spinning disk in front of the receiver. Each successive picture field was sent in one color, and the eye blended them into a full color image. This approach is called the field-sequential color system. CBS first demonstrated it on August 29, 1940, showed it to the press a few days later, and ran experimental broadcasts from a transmitter atop the Chrysler Building in New York.
The pictures were vivid, and Goldmark and others maintained that their color was better than that of the rival system being developed by RCA, though at lower resolution. After the war Goldmark improved the system, and the Federal Communications Commission adopted it as the American color standard on October 11, 1950. CBS began regular color broadcasts in the New York area on June 25, 1951. The system had one serious weakness: it was not compatible with the millions of black-and-white sets already in homes, which could not show its signal without an adapter. Color broadcasts stopped in October 1951, after the government asked manufacturers to halt production of color sets during the Korean War. Meanwhile RCA perfected an all-electronic color system that worked with existing sets, and in December 1953 the FCC approved that compatible system, which became the American standard. CBS had already withdrawn its own.
Goldmark's idea did not disappear. Because a single camera with a color wheel was much smaller, lighter and simpler than the three-tube studio cameras of the day, his method was widely used for closed-circuit television in industry, schools and hospitals, including transmissions of surgical procedures. NASA later chose a modified version of the CBS field-sequential system for the color cameras built by Westinghouse for the Apollo program, which flew from Apollo 10 in 1969 and sent color pictures from space and from the lunar surface. Many modern digital projectors still create color with a spinning color wheel, the same principle Goldmark demonstrated in 1940.
The long-playing record
Goldmark's most famous invention grew out of irritation. In the fall of 1945 he was at a friend's home when his host played a recording of Brahms's Second Piano Concerto. On the 78 rpm records of the day, the fifty-minute piece needed six discs, and the music stopped every few minutes while someone changed or turned the record. The heavy shellac discs were brittle, the steel needles wore them down, and the sound grew worse with every playing. Goldmark, the cellist, found the constant interruptions unbearable and set out to fix them.
CBS had looked at longer-playing records before the war, and the work resumed under Goldmark in 1945. He chose the team, bringing in William S. Bachman from General Electric, and much of the experimental work was carried out by Bachman and Howard H. Scott. The result was the microgroove record. By cutting the groove only about three thousandths of an inch wide, compared with about ten thousandths on a 78, slowing the turntable to 33 1/3 revolutions per minute, and pressing the disc in quiet, flexible vinyl instead of shellac, the team fit more than twenty minutes of music on each side of a 12-inch disc. A single LP held what had needed about six 78s. Lighter pickups and a long-lasting sapphire stylus reduced wear and noise.
Columbia Records unveiled the LP at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York on June 21, 1948, with an initial catalog of 133 recordings, from Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto with Nathan Milstein to Frank Sinatra. For the first time, listeners at home could hear a symphonic movement, a whole concerto or a Broadway score without getting up every four minutes. The discs were lighter and far less breakable than 78s, which cut the cost of shipping and storing records for producers, stores and buyers. The cast album of South Pacific in 1949 helped make the format a hit, and the whole American record industry soon adopted it.
The LP shaped the music business for the next forty years. It made possible the idea of the album as a complete work of art, gave classical music, jazz and theater a practical home on records, and brought affordable recorded music into millions of homes around the world. The 12-inch vinyl LP remains in production today, and the format at the center of the modern vinyl revival is the one Goldmark's team introduced in 1948. The National Inventors Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 2007, credits him with the invention of the long-playing record under U.S. Patent No. 2,950,116.
Pictures from the Moon and video on film
At CBS Laboratories Goldmark kept producing ideas. In 1956 Chrysler offered his Highway Hi-Fi, a record player designed to work in a moving car, using special 7-inch discs with extra-fine grooves. In the 1960s his laboratory developed the scanning system that allowed NASA's Lunar Orbiter spacecraft, launched from 1966, to read the photographs taken on film in orbit around the Moon and transmit them roughly 238,000 miles to Earth. The five Lunar Orbiter missions of 1966 and 1967 photographed 99 percent of the lunar surface and helped NASA choose landing sites for the Apollo astronauts.
He also pursued the idea of video at home. CBS announced his Electronic Video Recording, or EVR, system in August 1967. It stored pictures on thin, unperforated film in a plastic cartridge, with color information carried in coded form, and played it back through an ordinary television set. Goldmark saw it above all as a tool for education, a way for schools and libraries to show films and lectures on demand. A prototype was demonstrated in 1969, but EVR proved hard and costly to manufacture, and magnetic videotape soon overtook it. The goal it pointed toward, recorded video played at home whenever people wished, became part of everyday life within a decade.
Technology for rural America
Approaching the mandatory retirement age of 65, Goldmark left CBS Laboratories in 1971 and founded his own company, Goldmark Communications, in Stamford, Connecticut. He wanted to use communications technology to improve daily life, not only to entertain. His main project, the New Rural Society Project, was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation in the early 1970s and housed at Fairfield University in Connecticut.
The project ran pilot studies in the relatively rural Windham region of eastern Connecticut, testing how teleconferencing, cable television and other links could bring services such as remote medical consultations and education to people living far from big cities. Long before the internet, he was exploring what is now called telemedicine. He devoted much of his last years to using technology to improve education and the quality of everyday life.
Jewish roots
Goldmark was born into a Hungarian Jewish family. The Jewish Virtual Library describes him as a German-Hungarian Jewish engineer, and Hungarian reference works describe him as a Hungarian-American engineer of Jewish origin. His family's Jewish roots are well documented through his great-uncle, the composer Karl Goldmark, who came from a large Jewish family; Karl's father, Ruben Goldmark, served as cantor to the Jewish congregation at Keszthely in western Hungary.
Goldmark himself was a scientist and engineer whose public life centered on his work, and published sources say little about any personal religious practice, so this profile does not claim any. He belongs to the remarkable generation of Jewish-born scientists and engineers from Budapest, sometimes called the Martians, who left Hungary in the decades before World War II and did much of their most important work in the United States.
Legacy
Goldmark received many honors, including the David Sarnoff Medal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers and the Elliott Cresson Medal, both in 1969, and the medal of the Industrial Research Institute in 1972. On November 22, 1977, President Jimmy Carter presented him with the National Medal of Science for contributions to the development of the communication sciences for education, entertainment, culture and human service. Fifteen days later, on December 7, 1977, he was killed in a car accident in Westchester County, New York, at the age of 71. He was survived by six children from his two marriages, including Peter C. Goldmark Jr.
The National Inventors Hall of Fame counts 77 patents in his name, and the Lemelson-MIT Program credits him with more than 160 inventions in communications. His greatest gifts were practical ones. The long-playing record let ordinary people own and enjoy complete symphonies, operas and albums, and it remains in use today. His color television work lived on in medical, educational and space cameras that showed humanity the Moon in color. And his last projects foresaw a world in which a doctor or a teacher could reach people wherever they live. Few engineers have done as much to shape how the world listens and watches.
Sources & further reading
Peter Carl Goldmark, Jewish Virtual Library · Peter Goldmark, Lemelson-MIT Program · Peter C. Goldmark, National Inventors Hall of Fame · Peter Carl Goldmark, EBSCO Research Starters · Peter Carl Goldmark, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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