The Very First NTSC Color TV: 1954 RCA Model CT-100 The Merrill - Restoration Part X (Concluded!)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 ส.ค. 2024
- Chassis serial #B8002795, cabinet #759.
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The final video in the restoration series of the RCA CT-100. I also added the factory RCA line-level video input using a 12AT7 tube for video amplification, and also added an audio input as well as a switch to choose tuner or A/V. Please stay tuned after the video for a list of credits to people who have helped us along the way. It's finally done and in full service.
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For the first people to own one of these way back when it must've seemed like pure magic.
Just found out about these RCA's as one of the first Color TV's, having come out in 1954.. Amazing you people that have the tenacity and creativity to dive into such a nightmare of a project and dig out the gold!! Congratulations!! This is pretty awesome!!
Truly stunning! This is the best picture I've ever seen from ANY CT-100. Great work!
One can certainly see that the engineers who designed this receiver intended to have the colors *knock the socks off* of anyone who decided to watch this lovely set! However, in those days, I don't think the designers of this set took into consideration potential safety hazards regarding levels of X-radiation exposure for the service technicians who did field repairs and in-shop servicing.
This was built in the time that they had X-ray machines in shoe stores so you could see your feet inside your shoes. Also during this same time period in the 50's, you could buy admission ticket to watch nuclear bombs being tested in the desert.
@@dougfisher1813 Yes, I believe they called them "shoe-fitting fluoroscopes." Probably wouldn't have used one knowing what I know now. It would have been *really cool* to watch a nuclear test in the desert, as the plume way high up in the air made such a *beautiful* glow!
Wow thank you for sharing something fascinating this 80's kid didn't know!?! 😯
X-ray concerns were not considered a problem in 1954. Precautions first came along with the Shunt regulator a GE 6BK4 that had a lead shield in their first Color TV Sets circa 1961.
I recall 32 tubes in this set. I never worked on one. By the time I got into color TV the chassis was the CTC-11 model.when I left the company, RCA the CTC-62 was the latest XL-100. During my TV fixit days I worked on 8 to 10 color Tvs a day for 10 years. Today I know nothing about the new TV sets.
I went into teaching Color TV repair to RCA service techs, then I took a position at Sarnoff Labs as a research tech until I retired and taught in the Physics Dept. At Swarthmore College.
My parents had a B&W 1958 TV that ran through the 90s with a VERY clear picture, so obviously, even a color TV from 1954 must have looked awesome to the few who could afford it back then. You put in so much work on this television and did a great job. I'm so glad I'm able to see a 1954 color TV the way it looked back then, or at least very very close to it!
I read the book David Snaroff president of RCA. He eas very much involved with the technology and when it came to technical questions about the RCA color system he was very knowledgeable. He deserves credit for bringing color tv into our homes.
I've watched all parts of this series, and I must say, you did an excellent job on restoring this tv! Not to mention that the picture and sound look amazing on it! It's always good to see vintage electronics being revived instead of being thrown in the trash. Great job!😁👌
Completely amazing, great work! You saved a piece of history, one which saw the broadcast world change, slowly, but still change. A very significant set there! Just knowing that TV cost probably close to what someone would have paid for a nice used car or other important thing. Creating the factory composite modification is just icing on the cake. That you were able to find NOS parts is that much cooler. Thanks for showing this restoration, and for saving a small piece of history!
Glad you enjoyed it! And thank you!
Rewatching this video after a few months.. legend, we need more people like you
For an original first commercially available tv, I think the color looks great !
Certainly a lot of work there. Great job in restoration! Thanks for sharing this.
Beautiful Television! I restore and collect vintage vacuum cleaners! Some of my favorites are Hoover, Kirby and Electrolux! Great job guys!!
Ah, what an adventure! Well worth the wait, for sure. I know I'm not the only one that is glad to see the final product. You went way beyond what some would do by making it 'like-new' with such attention to detail. You both have completed that chapter with a bang.
When I was a kid I remember old color TVs had a problem staying in the right colors.
People's faces would slowly go from flesh tones to green.
You had to constantly adjust the colors, or live with people turning green.
Sometime around 1970 color TVs had automatic fine tuning and the color of people's faces stayed the same throughout the whole show.
You have a very rare specimen, only about a hundred of these still exist, and even fewer are in anything resembling working condition.
I'm 77 & was 8 in 1954! Since my family only had a b/w, t.v. from 1950, we couldn't even
think of buying a color set, since there were practically no color shows on then! I do
remember seeing an advertisement for an RCA 'color' t.v. in '54 or '55, showing one of
the few 'color' shows on, i.e. "Howdy Doody", but who wanted to spend $600, to see it?
The RCA CT100 cost $1000 in 1954 when the average annual family income in the USA was $4200.
In 2024 dollars, it would be over $11,000.
What a beaut! Its unfortunate I probably won't be stopping by to see you guys this year. Hopefully next year I'll be able to come by and see you guys and the CT100 fully restored.
Westinghouse was first to market an NTSC color receiver in late December 1953. The CT-100 was offered for sale in March 1954.
That is one good TV set. These old TVs are far much better than today's smart TVs. They are much louder. I have LED Smart TV's, and the sound on the modern TVs are not as loud as the old ones. We have one TV in the room which we had to have a soundbar attached to it, to make it louder, well we had a soundbar until my stepdad passed in 2017. I just want to go back to the vintage TV's and VCRs. Plus the smart TVs rely on Wi-Fi, which we have like 10 or 20 devices connected to Wi-Fi, and thats when my internet became slow and sluggish since we only have one router in one of the bedrooms. Again, excellent work Spats.
To be fair, your smart tv is very shallow front to back because of the flat panel where the old CRT TVs had depth to spare. You need excursion to get good "tone", and tiny flat speakers that fit in modern TVs just don't move that much air.
I can just imagine selecting channel 4 at 11.30pm to get Johnny Carson broadcast straight from the Empire State Building to my set wirelessly and without monthly cost !! He was on from 1962 to 1992, beginning from when this set was only 3 years past it's 1959 tube replacement. This set was probably set aside before Johnny ever wore a plaid suit or had white hair.
One of the few consumer sets ever made that used full bandwidth IQ colour demodulation and true NTSC red phosphors, that's why the colour is so rich and accurate.
The picture you achieved on your CT100 restoration looks way better than I remember on an original CT100 set from 1955 that I saw as a little kid. A neighbor was an exec at the RCA plant in Camden NJ and he had one on loan. Maybe it was an early R&D prototype because I believe these sets were mass produced in Bloomington, Indiana. Although I was thrilled to see any color image on a TV, even as a kid I could see it wasn't very good on a live broadcast of a TV game show. Colors did not at match at all from one camera to another and the quality of the color was nothing like what I had already seen in movie theaters. Yours looks great - better than the one at the early TV museum in Hilliard Ohio. In 1957, another childhood friend's parents bought a 21 inch RCA color set and it looked much better than the 15" CT100 but still not as good as yours. Beautiful work and admirable persistence.
You are very kind, thank you. My father told Spats and I the story of his first experience with color TV, it was in Conneautville PA. His neighbor bought a CT-100 the moment they went on sale, and then of course traded it in when RCA offered. My father said he and his friends would stand on the guy's porch and look at it through the front window. I can tell you in my 44 years on this planet, I've seen amazing displays of tenacity, love, and care in the restoration of many items... and Spats probably topped them all. The people we talked to, those who we credited in the video for their help.. it's been more than just a TV restoration... it's been a journey, and the people we have met along the way have made it worth it a hundred fold. Everyone from a six year-old who has never seen ANY type of CRT, to a 95 year-old who remembers seeing his very first TV of any kind, there have been many people interested, and we have been fortunate to have connected with them all through this one little ole TV. Thanks again.
@@HarleyBadger - Do you know the reason(s) that RCA essentially recalled the CT-100s? That is not a rhetorical question because I don't have any answers - just guesses.
@@S955US84 Sort of "simple economics" in a way. People rushed to buy these initially, and then just kind of stopped. There was little color programming at the time, and a big-ass black and white TV was cheaper than this small-screen, and people sort of lost interest because of the lack of color programming. RCA was insistent upon color... quickly lowered the price by more than half, almost nobody bought them, RCA soon finished the much-larger 21" color CRT, so they offered to take the CT-100s back and give the customers the 21 at no charge.
@@HarleyBadger "...as late as 1964 only 3.1 percent of television households in the U.S. had a color set." WIKIPEDIA
Re. .....US84. I'm from the UK and I read that the BBC experimented with NTSC colour tv in the mid to late 1950's but decided to wait for a better system to come along for the reasons you described, poor inconsistent colours, often drifting and not very true to life especially in less than perfect reception conditions.
I have a memory of early color tv. 1956 my family went over to a neighbor
In the San Fernando Valley
Smelling of lemon and orange trees. He was well off and bought a $3,000 color tv I was 5 years old to young to remember the tv brand. We watched a color cartoon of Jerald Boing Boing 10 minutes long. My dad was so excited and amazed my family talked about the experience for years afterward. Until my dad bought his own color tv in about 1965. In those days my family used to drive 2.5 hours to see a freinds RCA.
to watch Bonanza in color.
I remember the ooz and Ahzz. Such a nice video.
I have a 1948 piolit 3" tv not working.
Fantastic work! I really enjoyed seeing this project come together. So honored to have gotten a shout out in the credits. I wish I had done more. I think I only offered a couple of suggestions on cabinet part fabrications. This is truly a historical document of the CT-100 and will hopefully inspire others to resurrect them should more of them surface. Great job!
Those suggestions helped us fix it though! And thank you!
@@spatsbear awesome! So happy they helped!
Can't wait to see more old TVs while we're all stuck at home.
Very good looking RESTORATION. A beautiful piece of television history. The overall look is very original.... 💛
Great restoration job! Such beautiful color and performance!
Thank you very much!
This is really amazing! What amazes me the most is that you did this all by yourself! I fail at replacing belts;-)
The picture also is amazing, especially since the set is over 60 years old!
Thank you very much!
I've found an old advert for this set from a company called Barker Bros., and it sold for around $1,000 in 1954 which is the equivalent of about $11,000 today!
Awesome job on the restoration of this vintage TV. There's just something special about vintage electronics
Awesome TV, congrats! I knew a rich kid while growing up (late 1970s) who had a 1950s era color TV and he said he made his own tubes to get it to work. He was so rich I believed him!
best movie ever to test out any TV ! excellent effort on that classic unit
Wow this unit in good working condition can fetch a pretty penny in an auction.
I was born in 1948 and the first color TV I saw was in 1962. I was working as stock boy at a W.T. Grants store. I wanted to buy one on time from the store but the store manager wisely turned me down. As I recall the cheapest TV was $475 and I was making $1.25 an hour.
A fascinating piece of history. And such a beautiful collection.
Fantastic job with the finish on the cabinet, and electronics. You did an amazing and neat job with ALL THOSE RESISTORS.
WOW! Look at that gorgeous ribbon cane mahogany veneer cabinet.
Awesome to see it all together and working so wonderfully. The composite input is really a nice mod. Ah Animalympics the thing that most Americans would have seen on NBC, if the 1980 Olympics. had happened for us. If you want to show off the convergence of the set, you can always play Lisberger's 1982 project Tron on the set:)
Wowzers congratulations on a museum worthy restoration.
Many thanks!
Randomly popped in my recs. Amazing work! And cute costume haha
Great CRT restoration video! Really enjoyable to watch, very nice demonstration of performance in the end. Thank you for the upload.
Congrats!!
You should share this restore with Paul Carlson of "Mr. Carlson's Lab"... You did amazing work here !!
Beautiful ! Thanks for the trip back in time .
Excelente adaptación, y si que vale la pena ponerle entradas de AUDIO y VIDEO por que estas señores si son ABUELAS televisiones y de muy buena cálida y pesadotas siiiiiii 👏👏👏👏👏👏👍😁😃👍👍
I had a November 1953 CT-100 from Oregon that I got in working condition. The tubes in it were lab models and we're not even given their common names yet. Killer picture! Sold to Danny Gustison in the early 1990s for $2,500.00. Oh well, gone now.
This is soooo beautiful! Good job!
Wow. Good job to everyone that helped!
What a stable image!!! good colors and no black spots!!!!
I love the colors of these old sets.
Great Restauration.
Rdga
great job,thanks for sharing.
We had a 1961 RCA Vic that did not put out as high a quality color picture as your '54 model does!
I literally became attached to your channel just because of a Whelen WPS siren you showed back in 2009.
...Not merely restored.
But also MODERNIZED! (Albeit up to 1980s technology.)
Imagine if some dudes were crazy enough to put TWO speakers in that grill (and miraculously make them work properly). THAT'S how high-fidelity that one speaker is! XD
Yeah I mean really, I can sit here and listen to this YT video with ten grand worth of HiFi, or walk into the next room and switch on the set... and I can tell you for certain, the set sounds even better in person than recreated through TH-cam.
No fucking way the furry wit the old tv thats badass
It takes a ton of patience to "bear" on a project like this! Well done!
And my grandmother thought she was miss goody goody two shoes when at last her and grandpa got their first color set around 1974 as a Christmas gift. When they their very first television around 1951, for around 500 dollars (an atrocious amount of money at that time) the whole family would gather around the set, and remembers sometimes the children from the next door neighbors house would line up on the front porch or stand on the sidewalk and watch through grandma's front window to get a view. That's how big a deal a tv set was. Now, picture how wide their eyes you be in 1954 three yrs later seeing a color set.
Me da mucho gusto la experiencia que tienes y el valor de grabar estos tesoros y el proceso para reparar y darles manteniemito , no he encontrado un vídeo en.español , parecido
The audio was certainly loud and clear at 19:03!
I like that modification, it certainly does deserve it.
I've enjoyed every minute of this restoration. Nice job!
Oh hell yeah! Back to the Future on the CT-100.
Man, the colors are fantastic, I'm sure even more so in person.
Yup and thank you!
Haha, and you are welcome.
Hahahahahahahaha lol XD that was sure a nice blow from the rear of Harley Badger @ 19:03.
@@kraig8812 Harley looked proud of it, too!
@@dynatrak Hahahahahahaha! XD
Good job Spats and Harley!
the colors look so natural
I wonder what it was like to have a colour TV in 1954?
This is AMAZING! Thank your for sharing!! Great job!👏🏼
Excelente trabajo ¡¡¡¡¡....un televisor que tendría en mi casa y lo usaría bastante seguido.
Just found your channel. I noticed that there are so many vintage appliance channels, but so far I have only seen one vintage room air conditioner channel. You should have at least one to round out your collection.
Beautiful. Great way to force people to watch NBC; CBS and ABC had no color programs until the mid-60s.
Great job of restoration. I can't help but wonder what happened to the thousands of TV repair shops that eventually closed their doors forever. All the NOS parts that got trashed due to obsolescence.
I've still got a ton of RCA original parts from the 50s and 60s. Trying to give them away as I'm closing this year.
Удивительно хорошее изображение у телевизора,для тех лет
А что такое стоит справа от телевизора на 31-58 ?
I would install a couple of computer fans in the mesh aluminum just for cooling exhausting the heat out..
This TV was marketed the same year Elvis cut his first record in Sam Phillips Studio in Memphis.
Awesome set ! Great work on restoration it !
Just watched Animalympics on my ITT Trimline CP3204 or 2342 that I found in the loft of a warehouse, CRT's are so much better for colour/strobe effects. It says "West Germany" on the tube, It's from at least 1980, Maybe even earlier.
Ref. missing knobs and switches, would it be possible to make a silicone mould (just cheap stuff in a tube) of any repeat knobs you require, then fill with epoxy resin, which is far cheaper per pint from marine supplies places? A lick of paint to finish, and although it won't be perfect it would be pretty fair.
Awesome work!
That was absolutely beautiful inside and out and the performance was just unimaginable considering how bad some of the later sets were as they cheaper out.
And thanks for the LSD inspired cartoons near the end.
Now I'm just guessing but I would say a paid restoration like that would be around 5k in 2022 money?
What an amazing picture!
Funny showing a movie from 1985 depicting 1955 on a TV set from 1954.
NTSC:
Never
The
Same
Color
First color tv I ever saw was in 1967.
Man, I wish I can get my hand on a CT-100 !
Hello good night Love TV Brazil
Awesome television, would love to play an Atari 2600 on it..😆
I like that there's a fursuit in the thumbnail :3
41:29 Wait, is that your fursuit?
Sure is :3
@@spatsbear I love it
lol, wtf was that at the end? I thought your voice was in sync with a cartoon on the TV! Jesus, I was not expecting that! 🤣
Did you replace the flux capacitor?
LOL
beautiful job! Realy enjoyed this video.
HELLO BRAZIL BEAUTIFUL TV
only a really good restoration ,and the brand Rca Victor,mean high quality highly purity of colours for a tv set of mid of ´50 decade really amazed im a tv technician from argentina where the color tv sets comes in 1978,i have a original b/n dumont supertel of 1960 since 1960,and comes to my electronic tv repair very lot a brand american as halicrafters,dumont,zenth,cbs,standard electric,rca,wells gardner,motorola,philco ,all gloryes ,now is repair not a tv sets,oldest radios,record player turntables casette or tape recorders and 8 track player so far deeply interesting regards from buenos aires argentina
Great job Spats! It’s sweet to see it fully working again after all these years! Do you have any plans on displaying this upstairs?
We are finishing the basement so the room it is in will be the TV/VCR/Stereo/Fan displays. The CT-100 will be in that room proudly displayed there.
Fantastic!!
The blue cable, at 4 min. that looks like the delay line? Never seen the internals of a CTC2 before. What a slug of iron is that power transformer. Alone it must be 30% of the chassis weight.
Correct. That is the delay line.
You did an amazing job on this, even for such a big project with all those hurdles! BTW, at 8:35 did you notice the spelling error on the vertical transformer? It made me do a double take :-)
At least he didn't need a new horiontal transformer.
La vi un libro y siempre quise encontrar un video porque se veía la pantalla chica y aparecía un perro pero se veía rojo y azul , también quiero investigar que marca y modelo fue la primera en fabricar un televicion a color
I believe all the CTC-100 chassis were made at the RCA factory in Bloomington, IN. Was yours?
Did they broadcast anything in color in the mid 50's?
Yes, but very little. The sets were too expensive for most people. .
A job well done
If you don'nt want the floor damaged underneath....I woould keep a piece of plexiglass under it in case something decided to erupt.
What are you talking about?
Amazing restoration work. Just a comment. Your greens don´t look right. Maybe increasing the green screen a bit higher. Or maybe the issue is in the color demod circuit. Also I noticed that color bars look really different when changing channels, so fine tuning may have something to do with it.
Can the picture possibly have been this good when it was new? It looks to me very much the same in picture quality as the last of the CRT tellies that came through.
The short answer is yes, and possibly better than even later models as they simplified the color demodulators for cost reasons, but the early color chassis used all the available chroma bandwidth. My dad had a CTC9 that we ran until 1978 and the picture and color on that TV was spectacular, as good as the CTC68 XL100 that replaced it. The XL had a much brighter image and better focus (it had a 2nd anode voltage of 34KV), but the color wasn't any better and perhaps not as good as the 9 had.
@@ohger1 That really is astonishing. I always come back to thinking of the relatively slower progress of other technologies, however, compared with us in Europe this was breathtaking. I believe we (in the UK anyway) had only recently got bread off rationing, and most people thought fridges were a commercial premises device that wouldn't be available domestically for decades, though they soon started to become extensively available. Our cars were positively prehistoric compared to your spaceship cars, while you were getting automatic gear boxes, radios and power steering.
I appreciate that American people live to work whereas we work to live - you work so incredibly hard, and with such dedication, while Europeans expect and receive free healthcare, 6 weeks minimum of paid leave a year, plus up to 2 weeks for Christmas and New Year, Easter and a host of other Bank Holidays (as we call them). We work a 35 hour week and complain about that. So we will never compete with America, and I couldn't be so dedicated anyway. I lived in America for 2 years and only then realised just how much you throw yourselves into your work, and continual progress and innovation, and am grateful to live in a world with such wonderful people alongside us. Bless your dear hearts my cousins, and enjoy the benefits of your hard work.
Solo le scatole originali dei ricambi di quei vecchi componenti sono un cimelio!!! Per non parlare di tutto il resto. Quello che poi stupisce è quanto buona fosse la qualità dell'immagine se si pensa al periodo in cui uscirono, in pratica gli schermi a fosfori verdi dei pc anni 80 erano una fregatura 😂😂😂!
What a gem !!!