Bright Signals: A History of Color Television by Susan Murray (review)

Color has been a lively topic of research in various disciplines recently, as evidenced, for instance, by the recent work of Regina Blaszczyk on color in fashion and industrial design, of Nicholas Gaskill on color and modernist literature, and of numerous cinema scholars such as Barbara Flueckiger, Scott Higgins, Carolyn Kane, and Sarah Street.¹ In various ways, these historically oriented researchers have been attentive to various technical transitions in color practice from the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment. Much of this scholarship also displays careful, interdisciplinary, and frequently, intermedial methodologies that situate specific technical changes in relation to broader aesthetic transformations in color culture. Historical developments in color's apparatus have been comparatively framed in much of this work, implicitly and often explicitly, by recent transitions in digital technology that have affected cultural production profoundly, especially in terms of the richly chromatic nature of our contemporary media environment.

Susan Murray's Bright Signals: A History of Color Television adds dynamically to this growing body of scholarship, expanding it into the area of television history, which has until now been largely overlooked in the history of color, as color has likewise been underresearched in television studies. Cogently written and richly illustrated, Bright Signals tracks the invention and normalization of color television from 1928 to 1970 with interdisciplinary precision and historical depth. The book's focus is primarily on developments in the United States, although the author is also attentive to international currents. More than just a technical chronicle of the development of color television, Bright Signals examines the rich scientific, industrial, and aesthetic history of the medium while also paying close attention to the cultural and intermedial changes that occurred in tandem with its emergence. Drawing explicitly from media archeology, Murray notes that "television scholars have not yet read industrial discourses around, and studies of, electronic color in relation to broader philosophical and cultural conversations about the nature of color," which her study takes up in rigorous detail.² In doing so, she delineates how color was both an assumed fulfillment of the medium's ability to replicate and expand human vision while also a profound departure from the coalescing norms of black-and-white television. As such, innovations in technology further realigned the medium with the rapid expansion at midcentury of chromatic culture in, for instance, the domains of cinema, design, architecture, and fashion.

As with cinema, the origins of color television are rooted in philosophical and theoretical inquiries into physiology and perception, which structured the technical development of color in both mediums. The opening chapters of Bright Signals trace these intersections, exploring the initial experiments with color television, primarily from the late 1920s through the early 1940s, and the difficulties for standardization and colorimetry that color television raised during the same period. As Murray shows, even as black and white became the standard for television, color was central to the medium's self-conception as a device developed to convey liveness, immediacy, and distant views, for color was imagined to be "essential for the realistic experience of virtual presence."³ Yet the immense demands on both bandwidth and color fidelity hindered the adoption of color until after the war.

In her far-reaching account, Murray traces how the science and practice of colorimetry-from the physiological theories of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Hermann von Helmholtz to the research of Albert Munsell and Wilhelm Ostwald, along with standardizing boards like the Optical Society of America-were central to the development of midcentury color media and design. These ideas and practices formed crucial, structuring principles for color broadcasting. They enabled the innovations that led the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to eventually adopt the National Television System Committee color standard in 1953. In this move, the FCC approved the color system proposed by RCA (which owned NBC) over others, such as CBS's previously favored system. RCA...