CBS Laboratories or CBS Labs (later known as the CBS Technology Center or CTC) was the technology research and development organization of the CBS television network. Innovations developed at the labs included many groundbreaking broadcast, industrial, military, and consumer technologies.
History and significant technological achievements
CBS Labs in Stamford, CT
CBS Laboratories was established in 1936 in New York City to conduct technological research for CBS and outside clients. In October 1957 CBS President Dr. Frank Stanton, speaking at ground-breaking ceremonies for a new CBS Laboratories building in Stamford , Conn. said: "Our objective in establishing the Laboratories is to continue CBS leadership in communications and electronics and provide broader research and development services."
One year later, a group of 60 engineers and scientists, led by Dr. Peter Goldmark, left New York City and moved into the new 30,000 square-foot facility. The results of their efforts over the next 20 years resulted in a steady growth in facilities, personnel, sales, product development and technological leadership.
Laboratory facilities grew to include five well-equipped buildings totaling more than 200,000 square feet. Six major departments were engaged in a wide range of research and development programs for government, industry, education, medicine and the broadcasting field.
The total staff grew to more than 600 people, one-third of whom were professionals. Many of these professionals were internationally renowned in their respective fields and helped establish CBS Laboratories as a leader in electronics and communications research and development.
Dr. Peter Goldmark joined CBS Laboratories in 1936. On September 4, 1940, while working at the lab, he demonstrated the Field-Sequential Color TV system.[1] It utilized a mechanical color wheel on both the camera and on the television home receiver, but was not compatible with the existing post-war NTSC, 525-line, 60-field/second black and white TV sets as it was a 405-line, 144-field scanning system.[2] It was the first color broadcasting system that received FCC approval in 1950, and the CBS Television Network began broadcasting in color on November 20, 1950.[3] However, no other TV set manufacturers made the sets, and CBS stopped broadcasting in field-sequential color on October 21, 1951.[3]
Nevertheless, the Field Sequential Color System was selected to televise the real-time broadcasts from the Moon during the Apollo 14 Moon landing, since it uses far less bandwidth than the NTSC system.
Goldmark’s interest in recorded music led to the development of the long-playing (LP) 33-1/3 rpm vinyl record, which became the standard for incorporating multiple or lengthy recorded works on a single audio disc for two generations. The LP was introduced to the market place by Columbia Records in 1948.
In 1959 the CBS Audimax I Audio Gain Controller was introduced. It was the first of its kind in the broadcasting industry, and updated versions (Audimax 4440) continued to be manufactured by Thompson-CSF, which acquired the technology after the Labs were closed.[4] In the 1960s the CBS VoluMax Audio FM Peak Limiter was introduced, also the first of its kind in the broadcasting industry. Both the Audimax and VoluMax were considered the “gold standard” for audio processing used in the AM/FM and Television Broadcasting industry.[5]
At the same time, CBS Laboratories developed a solid-state character generator, a crucial component of the VIDIAC (Visual Information Display and Control) system built for the Air Force by a collaboration of several companies. Known as the "magnetic memory character generator," this component was responsible for storing and retrieving high quality alphanumeric characters, which was essential for the high-speed data display.[6]
Electronic Video Recording was announced in 1967. In 1966, the CBS Vidifont was invented. It was the first electronic graphics generator used in television production. Brought to the marketplace at the NAB in 1970, it revolutionized television production.[7] The minicam was developed for use in national political conventions in 1968. In 1971, a backwards-compatible 4-channel encoding technique was developed for vinyl records, called SQ Quadraphonic, based on work by musician Peter Scheiber and Labs engineer Benjamin B. Bauer.
That same year, CBS Labs Staff Scientist Dennis Gabor received the Nobel Prize in Physics for earlier work on holography. Upon Peter Goldmark's retirement, also in 1971, Senior Vice President Renville H. McMann assumed the role of Labs President.
Called the "Photograph of the Century" by space scientists, this first close-up picture of the crater Copernicus taken by the Lunar Orbiter was scanned and digitized by The CBS Laboratories film scanning system and transmitted back to Earth.
At the same time that CBS Laboratories developed technologies for the CBS Television Network, it also took on similar work for the Government. CBS Laboratories was selected by NASA Manned Spacecraft Center to provide the voice recorder for the Gemini space program (1964 - 1966). The Labs designed and built a very small (2.5 in square x .415 in thick) and reliable onboard voice recorder.[8]
An aerospace qualified film scanning system, consisting of a CBS Laboratories Line Scan Tube was developed for the Lunar Orbiter program to read out the processed film images taken by the Orbiter for transmission back to Earth.[9]
The CBS Laboratories Reconotron all-electrostatic image dissector tube was developed for the 1964 Mariner IV Mars mission as an azimuth star tracker, then was modified for the 1967 Mariner V Venus mission in order to withstand the intense planetary illumination. The sensor was further modified for the 1969 Mariner mission to Mars to survive the more severe launch environment and to provide greater capability for automatic search, identification, and tracking.[10]
In 1964 the Mergenthaler Co. and CBS Laboratories won a GPO contract to build a machine called the Linotron. The Linotron took a computer magnetic tape from the publishing agency that had been programmed through GPO’s computers, and composed the data in 6-point type at the rate of a page every 10 to 12 seconds, up to 1,000 characters per second, justified including upper and lower case letters, resulting in a page negative made up and ready to be plated and printed. This was accomplished using a highly-specialized Cathode Ray Tube developed by CBS Laboratories which had unequaled geometric fidelity and resolution. The introduction of the Linotron was characterized as “the most important development in composition since the introduction of the Linotype machine at the turn of the century.”[11]
The first Linotron went into operation in October 1967 and the second a year later. The dean of the Senate and Chair of the JCP, Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, pressed the key starting the Linotron 1010 on its first job, the Federal Supply Catalog. The Linotrons cost $2.3 million to develop and install, but in the first 13 months of operation the savings were estimated at $900,000. With it, “it can truly be said that in 1968 the Government Printing Office entered the electronic printing age.”[11]
A detailed discussion and description of the Linotron system can be found here.[12]
CBS Laboratories was a leader in the development of Electron Beam Recorders, (EBR), which use a finely focused beam of electrons to record information onto film. Because the electron beam has no inertia, it can be electromagnetically scanned over the film at a very high speed. Also, because it is focused using a magnetic field, instead of glass lenses, the electron beam can be focused to a much smaller spot than laser or other optical methods, on the order of a half-millionth of an inch.
One of the applications of the Electron Beam Recorder was in the ERTS-Landsat system, whose mission was to capture images of the Earth's surface in different spectral bands to provide data for Earth resource management and environmental monitoring. ThE ERTS satellites generated an immense amount of data, which was transmitted to dedicated ground stations to be recorded and processed for analysis. The ERTS EBR was a crucial part of the ground-station-based image data recording system,[13] capable of producing a thousand 70mm archival quality film images per day, from which all the other ERTS photographic products were produced.
During the Vietnam War, CBS Laboratories developed and produced the scanning and recording equipment for the Compass Link system, which provided one-way, near-real-time secure transmission of photographic and other battlefield imagery via satellite relays from Vietnam to Hawai'i and Washington, DC. Using available equipment, in many cases at the breadboard stage, it was developed, deployed and operational in the field and on shipboard 73 days after approval to proceed. Philco-Ford provided the satellite communications systems.[14]
In 1969, CBS Laboratories developed an advanced, state-of-the-art, MIL-Spec In-Flight Photo-Processor Scanner (IPPS) for JIFDATS (the Joint Services In-Flight Data Transmission System). Mounted in an external pod on a Mach-2, RF-4C reconnaissance aircraft, the target images from a KS-87 airborne film camera were processed, scanned and transmitted within 12 minutes of acquisition to a ground-based Image Interpretation Facility.[15]
CBS Laboratories technical publications
In addition to designing and building commercial and government products and systems, the technical staff was also contracted to write reports and analyses for government clients. Although most of the reports remain classified, a few have been unclassified and are available in the public domain. [16][17][18][19][20][21][22]
Sale of CBS Laboratories and subsequent history
In 1974, CBS Corp., under then-President Arthur R. Taylor, made the decision to focus on its primary media and broadcasting operations, away from the Government R&D and commercial product development, and divest these non-core assets.[23] As part of this reorganization, the CBS Laboratories Professional Products Department, which manufactured the products developed by the Labs for sale to the broadcast industry, was sold to Thomson-CSF.[24]
The remainder of CBS Laboratories, including all of its Government research and development activities, was acquired in 1975 by EPSCO Corp., based in Buffalo, NY, for the purpose of enhancing its technological capabilities and facilitating the entrance into new Government markets. EPSCO renamed the business as Epsco Labs, and after an unsuccessful attempt to convince the CBS Laboratories personnel to relocate to Buffalo, NY, EPSCO moved the complete operations and staff to a facility in Wilton, CT. The two original CBS Laboratories buildings on High Ridge Road in Stamford, CT were razed and the property sold.
Although EPSCO Corp. immediately began the process of novating the CBS Laboratories government R&D contracts to EPSCO, the process turned out to be much more time-consuming than EPSCO anticipated, due to the legal and regulatory implications involved in obtaining Government and Contracting Agency approvals of the many classified programs underway at CBS Laboratories. This year-long time delay greatly increased EPSCO's ongoing costs of funding the acquisition, to the point where EPSCO made the decision to liquidate the entire Epsco Labs facilities, staff and operations in 1976. As a result, all of the assets of the Laboratories, including all machinery, optical equipment, vacuum equipment, electronics, test facilities and equipment, as well as the office equipment, photo lab, machine shop and printing department were sold at auction over a four-day period in late May, 1976.
Patents
CBS Laboratories' staff registered approximately 100 patents in the fields of television, quadraphonic sound, scanning devices, laser scanning and recording, film handling systems, image and character generation, noise monitoring, hydrophones, forming electrophoretic and photoemissive surfaces, diffraction optics, photo-electronic imaging, electron guns, and more.
1956: Development of Video Tape by Ampex and Further Development and Practical Applications by CBS - dual entry
1958-1959: Industry-wide improvement of editing of Video Tape as exemplified by ABC - CBS – NBC
1965-1966: Stop Action Playback - MVR Corporation and CBS
1967: CBS Minicam - The CBS Minicam, a portable, battery-powered camera system, received an Engineering Emmy Award for its impact on news gathering and live broadcasting.
1968: Electronic Video Recording (EVR) system - CBS Laboratories developed the EVR system, which allowed for the recording and playback of high-quality video using a cassette tape format.
1970-1971: The Columbia Broadcasting System – For the development of the Color Corrector, which can provide color uniformity between television picture segments and scenes shot and recorded under different conditions at different times and locations.
1970-1971: CBS Laboratories received the Engineering Emmy Award for their development of the "Miniature Rapid Deployment Earth Terminal" (MRDET), which was recognized for its significant contributions to the field of television technology.
1974-1975: Emmy Award for CBS Laboratories' Electronic News Gathering System
1977-1978 CBS, INC. For the development of the Digital Noise Reducer
1978: CBS Fieldtronics - The CBS Fieldtronics system, a portable, electronic news gathering system, received an Engineering Emmy Award for its contributions to live broadcasting.
1978 Engineering Emmy Award for "Improved SMPTE Color Bars Standard ECR 1-1978" awarded to CBS Technology Center and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.
Awards and industry recognition for CBS Laboratories staff
Nobel Prize awarded to CBS Laboratories Staff Scientist
The 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Dr. Dennis Gabor, Staff Scientist at CBS Laboratories, who was also affiliated with the Imperial Colleges of Science and Technology, London, United Kingdom, “for his invention and development of the holographic method.” A description of his work, given at his Nobel Prize Lecture, can be found here.[26]
David Sarnoff Medal Recipients for CBS Laboratories Technical Staff
NTSC is the first American standard for analog television, published and adopted in 1941. In 1961, it was assigned the designation System M. It is also known as EIA standard 170.
Television (TV) is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. Additionally, the term can refer to a physical television set rather than the medium of transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, entertainment, news, and sports. The medium is capable of more than "radio broadcasting," which refers to an audio signal sent to radio receivers.
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) systems, which, in turn, were replaced by flat-panel displays of several types.
John Logie Baird was a Scottish inventor, electrical engineer, and innovator who demonstrated the world's first live working television system on 26 January 1926. He went on to invent the first publicly demonstrated colour television system and the first viable purely electronic colour television picture tube.
Color television or colour television is a television transmission technology that includes color information for the picture, so the video image can be displayed in color on the television set. It improves on the monochrome or black-and-white television technology, which displays the image in shades of gray (grayscale). Television broadcasting stations and networks in most parts of the world upgraded from black-and-white to color transmission between the 1960s and the 1980s. The invention of color television standards was an important part of the history and technology of television.
Video camera tubes are devices based on the cathode-ray tube that were used in television cameras to capture television images, prior to the introduction of charge-coupled device (CCD) image sensors in the 1980s. Several different types of tubes were in use from the early 1930s, and as late as the 1990s.
A television set or television receiver is an electronic device for the purpose of viewing and hearing television broadcasts, or as a computer monitor. It combines a tuner, display, and loudspeakers. Introduced in the late 1920s in mechanical form, television sets became a popular consumer product after World War II in electronic form, using cathode ray tube (CRT) technology. The addition of color to broadcast television after 1953 further increased the popularity of television sets in the 1960s, and an outdoor antenna became a common feature of suburban homes. The ubiquitous television set became the display device for the first recorded media for consumer use in the 1970s, such as Betamax, VHS; these were later succeeded by DVD. It has been used as a display device since the first generation of home computers and dedicated video game consoles in the 1980s. By the early 2010s, flat-panel television incorporating liquid-crystal display (LCD) technology, especially LED-backlit LCD technology, largely replaced CRT and other display technologies. Modern flat-panel TVs are typically capable of high-definition display and can also play content from a USB device. Starting in the late 2010s, most flat-panel TVs began to offer 4K and 8K resolutions.
Mechanical television or mechanical scan television is an obsolete television system that relies on a mechanical scanning device, such as a rotating disk with holes in it or a rotating mirror drum, to scan the scene and generate the video signal, and a similar mechanical device at the receiver to display the picture. This contrasts with vacuum tube electronic television technology, using electron beam scanning methods, for example in cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions. Subsequently, modern solid-state liquid-crystal displays (LCD) and LED displays are now used to create and display television pictures.
Peter Carl Goldmark was a Hungarian-American engineer who, during his time with Columbia Records, was instrumental in developing the long-playing microgroove 331⁄3 rpm phonograph disc, the standard for incorporating multiple or lengthy recorded works on a single disc for two generations. The LP was introduced by Columbia's Goddard Lieberson in 1948. Lieberson was later president of Columbia Records from 1956–1971 and 1973–1975. According to György Marx, Goldmark was one of The Martians.
The iconoscope was the first practical video camera tube to be used in early television cameras. The iconoscope produced a much stronger signal than earlier mechanical designs, and could be used under any well-lit conditions. This was the first fully electronic system to replace earlier cameras, which used special spotlights or spinning disks to capture light from a single very brightly lit spot.
The 405-line monochrome analogue television broadcasting system was the first fully electronic television system to be used in regular broadcasting. The number of television lines influences the image resolution, or quality of the picture.
The concept of television is the work of many individuals in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The first practical transmissions of moving images over a radio system used mechanical rotating perforated disks to scan a scene into a time-varying signal that could be reconstructed at a receiver back into an approximation of the original image. Development of television was interrupted by the Second World War. After the end of the war, all-electronic methods of scanning and displaying images became standard. Several different standards for addition of color to transmitted images were developed with different regions using technically incompatible signal standards. Television broadcasting expanded rapidly after World War II, becoming an important mass medium for advertising, propaganda, and entertainment.
A number of experimental and broadcast pre World War II television systems were tested. The first ones were mechanical based and of very low resolution, sometimes with no sound. Later TV systems were electronic.
Bernard Marshall Gordon is an American engineer, inventor, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. He is considered "the father of high-speed analog-to-digital conversion".
Electronic Video Recording, or EVR, was a film-based video recording format developed by Hungarian-born engineer Peter Carl Goldmark at CBS Laboratories in the 1960s.
A field-sequential color system (FSC) is a color television system in which the primary color information is transmitted in successive images and which relies on the human vision system to fuse the successive images into a color picture. One field-sequential system was developed by Peter Goldmark for CBS, which was its sole user in commercial broadcasting. It was first demonstrated to the press on September 4, 1940, and first shown to the general public on January 12, 1950. The Federal Communications Commission adopted it on October 11, 1950, as the standard for color television in the United States, but it was later withdrawn.
High-definition television (HDTV) describes a television or video system which provides a substantially higher image resolution than the previous generation of technologies. The term has been used since at least 1933; in more recent times, it refers to the generation following standard-definition television (SDTV). It is the standard video format used in most broadcasts: terrestrial broadcast television, cable television, satellite television.
The following timeline tables list the discoveries and inventions in the history of electrical and electronic engineering.
Dr. Richard R. “Dick” Green is best known for his work heading up Cable Television Laboratories (CableLabs), the research arm of the cable industry, and for his work with international television standards organizations. After a more than 50-year career in telecommunications and television Green was honored with a Prime Time Emmy for lifetime achievement from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and was inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame.
375-line corresponds to two different electronic television systems, both using 375 scan lines. One system was used in Germany after 1936 along with the 180-line system, being replaced in a few years by the superior 441-line system. It was also tested in Italy around the same time.
References
↑ "Color Television Achieves Realism". New York Times. 1940-09-05. p.18.
↑ S. Baron, “Inventing the Vidifont: the first electronic graphics generator used in television production,” IEEE History Center (www.ieeeghn.org), 11 December 2008.
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