Dwight D. Eisenhower

The oldest surviving color videotape recording in the world was made on May 22nd, 1958. You can watch it right now. It starts in black and white, the way all television looked back then. Then, about fourteen minutes in, a man named Robert Sarnoff pushes a big button, an engineer throws the color burst switch, and the world goes color.

The man standing in front of the cameras at that exact moment is President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The occasion was the dedication of NBC’s brand new $4,000,000 television-radio center on Nebraska Avenue NW in Tenleytown. NBC had designed and built the facility, as they put it, “from the ground up for color television.” This wasn’t a retrofit. It was a purpose-built monument to a technology still in its infancy.

Eisenhower was the obvious choice to cut the ribbon. He arrived at the Nebraska Avenue studios to a crowd that included members of the Supreme Court, members of Congress, and other senior Government officials. Before he spoke, he toured the engineering facilities. What he saw apparently left an impression.

In his remarks, reported in the New York Times on May 23rd, 1958, Eisenhower said the technical facilities were “like nothing else so much as the radar room of a big battleship — entirely beyond my comprehension, but capable of exciting my imagination.”

He told the audience it was important “in these fast-moving times” that Government decisions and world events be passed to every citizen “by the very fastest kind of communications.” The ceremony, the Times noted, was televised in color nationally by NBC.

The man narrating the opening was David Brinkley, then NBC’s Washington anchor and already one of the most recognizable voices in American broadcasting. He walked viewers through Studio A while Eisenhower toured the engineering rooms with the Sarnoffs.

Both Sarnoffs were there. David Sarnoff was the founder and chairman of RCA, the parent company of NBC. His son Robert was president of NBC. It was Robert who threw the switch, hitting the button that signaled an engineer to flip the color burst switch on the RCA TK-40 studio color camera, converting the black and white picture to living color.

The studio had been using a combination of RCA Image Orthicon black and white cameras and RCA color cameras running in monochrome for the arrival and early ceremonies. When the speeches began, the color cameras took over fully.

Here is something that surprises people: the tape was not recorded in Washington at all. The live broadcast originated from the Nebraska Avenue studios, but the actual recording was made 3,000 miles away at NBC’s Videotape Central in Burbank, California.

The recording format was known as “RCA Labs Color,” a heterodyne color method developed by RCA’s research laboratories. It was a specific technical standard distinct from the Low Band Color format that SMPTE would later establish as the industry norm.

Two copies of the program were made. Robert Sarnoff mentioned during the broadcast itself that one was being presented to President Eisenhower. The other ended up in the holdings of the Library of Congress. Or so everyone thought.

Fast forward thirty years. In 1988, color television historian and engineer Ed Reitan and his collaborator Don Kent were working to restore another early NBC color tape, “An Evening with Fred Astaire,” at KTLA in Los Angeles. They needed a working 2-inch Quadruplex machine capable of playing back RCA Labs Color, which required significant technical modification. Reitan redesigned roughly ten circuit boards in an Ampex AVR-1 to recover the old format.

While that restoration was underway, UCLA film and television archivist Dan Einstein brought in the WRC-TV dedication tape from the Library of Congress. It wasn’t in good shape. “We actually DID run the original tapes back and forth to set the machine,” Kent later recalled. “Their dropouts were sometimes so bad that we weren’t really concerned about damaging them any further.”

During playback, they caught something. On camera, Sarnoff had mentioned that a copy was being sent to President Eisenhower. Einstein started digging. He found the second copy at the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas. The staff there didn’t even know what it was.

“I broke the original hold-down tape on the reel which had been put there in 1958!” Kent said.

There were still technical problems. About two-thirds through the program, the audio line failed during David Sarnoff’s speech. NBC switched to a backup telco line, but the audio quality degraded noticeably. Kent ran it through an equalizer and did what he could. A video dropout later in the tape couldn’t be repaired at all; frames were simply missing.

For their work restoring the Fred Astaire tapes in that same session, Einstein, Kent, and Reitan received an Emmy Award in 1989 for Outstanding Achievement in Engineering Development.

Ed Reitan passed away on January 6th, 2015.

The Cold War context is worth holding in mind. Eisenhower’s remarks about “almost instantaneous reaction” and “fast communications” weren’t just ceremony. In May 1958, the Soviet Union had launched Sputnik just seven months earlier. The Space Race was on. The idea that a government could speak directly to its citizens, in color, in real time, from a facility designed and built for exactly that purpose. That carried weight in a way that’s easy to underestimate today.

NBC’s Nebraska Avenue complex remained the home of the network’s Washington bureau for more than sixty years, until 2020. The building is still there. The station is still there, as NBC4 Washington.

Check out the video below. Skip to about 1:23 for the moment the color comes on.