Early Color Television
Raytheon 15 Inch Color
This set was owned by Bill Morrison, Sr,
an electrical engineer who worked at Raytheon and worked on CRT, radio and televsion technology. He worked for Raytheon along with many other companies. It was donated to the museum by William Orrin and Judith Marie Morrison and family.
The son and daughter of the engineer recall this:
He would fire this up every Thanksgiving for the family to watch. The people were very small but it was cool to watch. The set had a three inch thick lead glass in front of the picture tube. My mom did recall that this TV was the first off the line and was offered to employees for $100. She recalls they got this one right around Christmas. My dad & another employee used to discuss the TV and help each other keep it working.
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Courtesy of Steve Dichter
This article was published 10 days before Admiral had announced it was shipping color sets to dealers and distributors. It may be that Raytheon was the first company to sell NTSC color sets to the public.
These pictures are of a surviving chassis. Here are comments from Bob Millard:
| Attached are some pictures I took of the Raytheon TV chassis. The larger is the color chassis and the smaller is a modified b&w chassis. The tall can in the center back of the video chassis is their rather strange UHF tuner. There’s a picture of the delay line under the color chassis and a closer shot of the focus & convergence HV supplies. The video chassis supplies the sweep & 2nd anode – no HV regulation – I wonder how well that worked??? |
At the 2018 Early Television Convention, Steve Kissinger and Darryl Hock were able to get the set working. Steve had restored the chassis in Calfornia earlier.
