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1954<br />
1 5 8 WIRED TEST<br />
By the 1950s, television had<br />
become the national nightly<br />
pastime, but tiny screens and<br />
monochrome pictures left viewers<br />
itching for improvement. Color<br />
was the obvious next step, and by<br />
1954 the technical challenges of<br />
broadcasting in full color had been<br />
overcome. RCA gave America a<br />
way to watch the new waves, that<br />
same year releasing the CT-100—<br />
an enormously complex device<br />
that required two sets of circuits,<br />
one for color, one for B&W. Alas,<br />
it met with little success in the<br />
market. Picture quality was poor;<br />
images were blurry and ghosted.<br />
“Only an inveterate (and wellheeled)<br />
experimenter should let<br />
the advertisements seduce him<br />
into being ‘among the very first’<br />
to own a color TV set,” sniffed Consumer<br />
Reports. Yet more than 50<br />
years later, wired readers voted<br />
the CT-100 the Greatest Gadget of<br />
All Time (see page 23) for launching<br />
television as we know it today.<br />
RCA CT-100<br />
Television<br />
Best Gadget of All Time
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