1954 Westinghouse H840CK15 Color Television Set

Picked this up from a friend yesterday for a crazy good price. It's the very first model of NTSC color television set conclusively proven to have been offered for sale to the general public in 1954. There is some speculation that Admiral may have been first, but to date nobody has been able to prove if they actually sold one of their sets.

Westinghouse listed this set for $1,295 in 1954, which would be about $11,622 dollars today when adjusted for inflation. Needless to say, only the well-heeled would have been watching color television in '54.

It sports an 11.5 inch by 8.625 inch screen, uses 44 tubes total including the CRT and rectifiers, and drew about 550 watts of power. About 500 were made, and a little over twenty survive today, making it the second most common 1954 color model. Compared to the nearly 200 RCA CT-100s that survive out of a total production of 4,400, this set is not easy to find.

My set is missing it's mask, knobs, speaker, and back, but both chassis are present. The 15GP22, which is very hard to find and also extremely unreliable, seems on a CRT tester, and with a tesla coil, to actually be good. Upwards of 95% of surviving 15GP22s are duds.

I plan to start the arduous task of restoring and recapping the chassis soon. If I can get the set operational, then I'll turn my attention to the cabinet, and having a reproduction mask and reproduction knobs modeled in CAD and made.

Here's what survives of the cabinet:


Here's the main chassis and the CRT:


And finally the getters in the CRT; they don't look bad at all for a 15GP22:


I thought some of you guys might appreciate how far home theater has come...

 

Love it.

 

Amazing!

dan c

 

Ancient television sets like this fascinate me, too! About 20 years ago, I found a 1941 television set that still had Channel One, but couldn't afford it!

 

love it! Mono sound, color picture.

Would Lassie have been broadcast when this tv was the model to be the "First" to have on the block?

 

Anyone else not able to open pics?

 

This set predates "Lassie". The CRT in this set was manufactured in the 13th week of 1954, and the set itself was manufactured sometime in early April.

Lassie premiered in September of 1954... in B/W. Lassie wouldn't convert to color until the mid-60s.

 

Wow

 

What content was being broadcast in color in the mid 50's? I've seen one off special editions of variety shows, but was any weekly show or sporting events in color? What about color movies?

 

Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, a few others . . . kind like 4K these days.

 

In 1954 NBC actually had a fairly ambitious color schedule of a few hours a week minimum. CBS, having lost the earlier color war, opted to show very little color content in 1954, and well into the 1960s. ABC had essentially zero color programming circa 1954. In fact, a large majority of ABC affiliated stations didn't have the capability to show network programs in color circa when the Flintstones went color in September of 1962. Broadcasting in color required additional monitoring equipment and modifications to the transmitter to transmit a color NTSC signal, something few ABC or CBS affiliates had.

As far as content, it was anything really. Sporting matches, color films, dramatic presentations, a lot of made-for-color extravaganzas.

An episode of Dragnet was shot in color (now lost in color, extant in B/W). There was a color episode of Burns and Allen, color episodes of Eddie Fisher's Coke Time, color episodes of Dinah Shore. A production of MacBeth. An episode of Camel News Caravan. There was a live regular color sitcom entitled "The Marriage" starring Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn.

NBC really failed in some ways to fully exploit color television. You don't sell sets by showing the same ******** you've been showing all along, just in color...

 

In 1956, friends got an RCA color TV and I remember seeing a golf game and Perry Como in color then.

 

Sorry for the question but I'm 43 and from a Pal country (Spain) but, did you habe to make much use of the Tint control back on those days? On the latter days of NTSC was there an automatic way to correct tint or you still had to use Tint control? My first experience with NTSC was with Laser Disc that I imported from the US and I seldom used the Tint control on my Sony multistandard set, and I was amazed at how stable and flicker free NTSC video was due to its higher scanning frquency.

 

My dad in Brooklyn saw a color telecast of a Brooklyn Dodgers vs Pittsburg Pirates game around 1955. The set was located in an Italian restaurant in Bensonhurst . The general consensus was amazement that this was even possible. I'm sure that the green grass of Ebbets Field, and the Blue, red and white Dodgers uniforms must have looked Gorgeous on those early tube color sets.

 

Tamla Junkie: I meant to post this earlier, but had to go into work today.

The very first thing you should do, if you havent already, is to register with this site and pick the brains of the good folks there about your picture tube and your restoration:

Antique Radio Forums • View forum - Antique Television Discussions

The group there is extremely knowledgeble about old TVs and can help you greatly.
Also...you need to keep an eye on safety. Those old tvs , with their crazy high voltages can be very, very dangerous. Please use caution at all times or pay a pro to restore it.

 

Here is something that I think everyone interested in early Color TV will like.
This is a film , taken off a test TV monitor in 1949, that shows what the CBS sequential Color Wheel System looked like.
It really is cool looking. And the model looks like Priscilla Presley!!

HD Stock Video Footage - First color television broadcast using the CBS color method is photographed at the National Guard Armory in Washington, D.C.

 

Yes and no. The Westinghouse actually has its hue control on the back of the set. Given the technology of the time, this was a terrible idea. The 1954 General Electric color television set, model 15CL100, also had the hue control on the back.

The engineers at RCA thought that phase and amplitude distortion of the chroma would be relatively constant from the transmission site to the antenna of the receiver, and they were fundamentally correct in this belief. What they failed to account for was the drift inherent in tube circuitry. A clean colorburst had to be reinserted for broadcast right before transmission at the individual stations according to FCC rules. This was always done, but rarely done correctly in the early days. Hue would shift from camera to camera in the studio, from the camera to the film chain, and again when switching over to the network feed, or later, a tape machine. This is simple to correct for; simply vary the phase of the reinserted color-burst so as to correct the hue of the image. This would be done once when switching feeds. Then, over the course of the program, the tube circuits in the cameras, chains, tape machines, colorplexors, etc, would all heat up and drift. The phase of the reinserted colorburst would eventually need "touching up" again, sometimes in as little as five to ten minutes. This wasn't typically done.

The fix would be to vary the phase of your own local color oscillator in your set, thus correcting the hue at the receiving end. There are two problems with this:

a) if the phase shift over time is slow enough, a majority of viewers won't ever notice and
b) most people couldn't set the color hue and saturation controls correctly anyway, due at least in part to defects in the vision of viewers, variations in CRT phosphor, etc

Also note that the tube chroma sections of the receivers were drift prone as well, leading to another source of error.

Later solid state circuits at both the studios/transmitter and at the receiver made NTSC color much more stable. Now distortions from transmission were the chief issue. General Electric developed the VIR system, which was an aborted attempt to make NTSC match the stability of a PAL transmission.

625 line PAL partially corrected these issues, but at a cost:

PAL gave up better the superior I/Q chroma encoding/demod scheme, but this was rarely exploited in NTSC recievers anyway. PAL had equal chroma response for both difference signals.

PAL receivers were more expensive due to the higher cost of the delay lines used.

PAL had an inherently lower temporal resolution (but higher spatial resolution).

PAL required a 7 or 8 MHz channel, in the US, Canada, and Mexico, 6 MHz was the bandwidth of a channel.

In the UK, 625 line was not backward compatible with 405 line monochrome broadcasting. In the US, any NTSC set ever built could have received OTA television without any adapters until the analog shutoff. No dual standard sets were ever necessary.

Finally, we got a working, though imperfect color television standard 10 years earlier than the rest of the world. PAL borrowed heavily from our NTSC color standard. PAL may have been prettier, but it ultimately descended from the loathed NTSC standard.

 

Stereoguy, I appreciate your concern, but I am a "pro" at restoring vintage television sets. This will be my ninth color "roundie" restoration, and my second set with a 15GP22. I've restored, and since sold, a 1954 RCA CT-100. I have no clue how many early B/W sets I've restored at this point... too damn many.

You're right though, a project like this isn't for the inexperienced or the faint of heart.

"Restoring a tube radio or amp is like a walk through the park. Restoring a tube television set is like going to war. Restoring a tube color set is starting a land war in Asia."

 

When I was 11 years old, my RCA Shelby taught me about flybacks. I landed on my ass.

 

Adventures of Superman was filmed in color for much of its' run, but I don't know how many stations actually broadcast it in color.

 

Wow that is a great score and an amazing piece of history. I love your technical information too...very interesting and informative.

Sounds like a fun restoration project; I hope it goes well and would be interested to see the end results.

 

OUTSTANDING.

 

It was never broadcast in color during the original run, but the value of syndication and the rerun was starting to be explored. Some of the mid-50s Disney TV programs were shot in color, so that they could eventually be broadcast again in color... and they were, starting in 1961.

Along those same lines, Desilu considered filming "I Love Lucy" in color starting in 1954, but Desi was cheap. Can you imagine how fantastic Lucy would have looked in color?

 

Cool. My birth year and the year the name Rock n roll was coined plus the Fender Stratocaster Guitar arrived.

 

Thanks for your reply, very informative for all us who live and grew up on Pal countries. I never thought about color phase shifting on cameras and processing equipment, I thought color phase shifting only happened between the broadcaster, and all the path the final signal went through like OTA, satellite or cable, and the T.V. set. You're telling me about the posibility of a lot of phase shifting and plenty of correction to be done. You must have been extremely happy when the first DVD players and T.V. sets with component outs/inputs showed up.
But Pal is no panacea, not because of Pal per se, color was good, but for the luminance part. Believe me, 625/50i is a lousy system, and the bigger the T.V. sets got the lousier it became. Not all people are so sensitive to flicker, I am. The first time I saw a whole movie on a NTSC Laser Disc (it was The Empire Strikes Back) I got amazed at how stable picture was. The difference in resolution was barely noticed on a Sony 25" T.V. set but the different scanning frequency of NTSC of 60 Hz versus 50 Hz of Pal, that I could tell and even more after two hours of movie watching in a fully dark room. NTSC won. When DVD was introduced I got my first player and discs from the US importing them from Amazon and Ebay, but after getting used to NTSC I didn't want anything to do with Pal.