Bright Signals: A History of Color Television

 

Bright Signals: A History of Color Television by Susan Murray was a weighty book generously supplemented with colour photos (as it should) yet it was a slow read as I felt it was bogged down with excessive technical language. Perhaps a book such as this isn’t meant for pleasure reading, as the endnotes were populated sometimes with more than one hundred per chapter, and the book was only 257 pages long. However as the book progressed from tech talk about how TV’s worked to a history of how colour television was introduced–surprisingly, with reluctance–into American living rooms, it became more of an interesting read.

From the plentiful notes and citations I noticed immediately that Murray relied mainly on women experts and scientists to tell this history. Women are often overshadowed in their contributions to science and Murray ensured that if a point had to be proven, she sought a woman whose work or text could be cited. Many of the networks’ first colour consultants were women, hired to ensure that the colours on the set worked in harmony and did not clash. Murray outlined the psychological studies conducted about the effectiveness of colour and how it might affect the hues projected into the home. I found all this psycho-colour talk to be overkill, but it was considered important at the time when all people had to look at was black-and-white. Colour also influenced advertising and sponsors loved it as they felt it enhanced their products and made them more sellable.

One reason the viewing audience did not at first embrace colour television, aside from the obvious high price of the sets themselves, was on account of the poor quality of the colour reception. Colours bled or did not transfer properly, so the viewing experience was an expensive muddle of finger paints. Murray cited Cynthia Lowry in the Los Angeles Times:

“Sometimes, it seems, we spend more time in deep knee bends adjusting the set than sitting back enjoying the show. It is obvious that the three networks have not gotten together to synchronize their palettes. On a Sunday night if one adjusts his set–as directed–to flesh tones on the suntanned face of Efrem Zimbalist Jr. on ABC’S The FBI and switches over to CBS’ Ed Sullivan, the latter often looks as if he were suffering from an advanced case of yellow jaundice. That requires some more emergency knob tuning.”

Murray’s history ended with the various moon landings, so she took colour TV to outer space and wrote about the special equipment and transmission needed. For such a slow read–I felt it would have taken me longer to read this than it did–the book did pick up and I embraced all the vibrant photos of colour TV ads, no doubt printed that way to entice potential customers to ditch their B&W sets and take the plunge into the colour pool.

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics

Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps that Tell You Everything You Need to Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall is the 2015 edition dealing with Russia, China, USA, Western Europe, Africa, The Middle East, India and Pakistan, Korea and Japan, Latin America and The Arctic. The first chapters were more relevant to the thesis: how a region’s geography confines it in ways that are unavoidable, such as dealing with mountain ranges, rivers, deserts and oceans. I felt that the author drifted from the “prisoner” relationship in the later chapters, but that may only be because the first regions, namely Russia, PR China and the USA are so vast and are among the most vital to international politics and economics.

Marshall covered how a country’s terrain could render it vulnerable to attack, and outlined past wartime strategies that sent troops into Russia and the Chinese mainland, and why these two nations desire buffer zones to keep them protected. In spite of their sporadic antagonism, India and PR China will never go to war because they have a little hurdle called the Himalayas straddled between them. I appreciated the explanation about the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan. In spite of their single instance of glacier warfare, these two countries cannot engage in any kind of long-term ground conflict in Kashmir. I had memories of my university political geography class whenever I read about the slashing straight lines of colonial borders. Africa and the Middle East are full of them. They divide people indiscriminately and conflicts brew when people find they have to show a passport to go into an area that they and their ancestors have visited for generations. The author devoted a single paragraph to the Canada–Denmark dispute over Hans Island, yet misplaced the tiny speck on the Arctic map. Maps were essential to each chapter and it was helpful that Marshall included all the minor bodies of water and landforms that he was talking about.

I had to laugh at what Marshall wrote about the European Union:

“What is now the EU was set up so that France and Germany could hug each other so tightly in a loving embrace that neither would be able to get an arm free with which to punch the other.”

Map geeks will love this book and will wonder when the next edition will come out, as there are plenty more than just ten regions where geographic prisoners are incarcerated. I see that the junior version of this book includes two additional maps: that of Canada and Australia, so Marshall has at least covered two of them.

 Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue