'Tis just 40 years since North American TV stations started broadcasting in colour, using the NTSC system. Officially NTSC was named after the National Television System Committee which chose it. Unofficially NTSC has often been called Never Thrice the Same Colour. A journalist who used to cover the NTSC told us recently of a lighter moment at the laboratories of the record company RCA in Princeton, New Jersey, where the system was developed. Team leader George Brown laid on a final transmission test. A colour camera was focused on a bowl of colourful fruit in one lab, and the received signal was displayed in another lab on a prototype colour tube. Just before the test Brown took a banana from the bowl and painted it blue. For the rest of the day the engineers at the receiving end struggled desperately to find out how their new system was faithfully reproducing the colour of red apples, orange oranges and green grapes, but resolutely converting yellow into blue.
--- from New Scientist, 2 Jul 1994.
Database Dated : 9/11/2024 6:56:13 PM