Editing Color television (section)

===All-mechanical color===
[[File:Adamian1.jpg|thumb|right|230px|[[Hovannes Adamian]] c. 1900s]]
The basic idea of using three monochrome images to produce a color image had been experimented with almost as soon as black-and-white televisions had first been built.

Among the earliest published proposals for television was one by Maurice Le Blanc in 1880 for a color system, including the first mentions in television literature of line and frame scanning, although he gave no practical details.<ref>M. Le Blanc, "Etude sur la transmission électrique des impressions lumineuses", ''La Lumière Electrique'', vol. 11, 1 December 1880, pp.&nbsp;477–481.</ref> Polish inventor [[Jan Szczepanik]] patented a color television system in 1897, using a [[selenium]] photoelectric cell at the transmitter and an electromagnet controlling an oscillating mirror and a moving prism at the receiver. But his system contained no means of analyzing the spectrum of colors at the transmitting end, and could not have worked as he described it.<ref>R. W. Burns, ''Television: An International History of the Formative Years'', IET, 1998, p. 98. {{ISBN|0-85296-914-7}}</ref> An [[Armenians|Armenian]] inventor, [[Hovannes Adamian]], also experimented with color television as early as 1907. The first color television project is claimed by him,<ref>Western technology and Soviet economic development: 1945 to 1965, by Antony C. Sutton, Business & Economics - 1973, p. 330</ref> and was patented in [[Germany]] on 31 March 1908, patent number 197183, then in [[United Kingdom|Britain]], on 1 April 1908, patent number 7219,<ref>The History of Television, 1880–1941, by Albert Abramson, 1987, p. 27</ref> in [[France]] (patent number 390326) and in [[Russia]] in 1910 (patent number 17912).<ref name="tvmuseum.ru">{{Cite web|url=http://www.tvmuseum.ru/attach.asp?a_no=1018|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20130424162531/http://www.tvmuseum.ru/attach.asp?a_no=1018|url-status=usurped|title=A. Rokhlin, Tak rozhdalos' dal'novidenie (in Russian)|archivedate=24 April 2013}}</ref>

Shortly after his practical demonstration of black and white television, on 3 July 1928, Baird demonstrated the world's first color transmission. This used scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals of apertures, each spiral with filters of a different primary color; and three light sources, controlled by the signal, at the receiving end, with a [[commutator (electric)|commutator]] to alternate their illumination.<ref>John Logie Baird, [https://patents.google.com/patent/US1925554 Television Apparatus and the Like], U.S. patent, filed in U.K. in 1928.</ref> The demonstration was of a young girl wearing different colored hats. The girl, [[Noele Gordon]], later became a  TV actress in the soap opera ''[[Crossroads (British TV series)|Crossroads]]''.<ref>As detailed by ITV in their on-air obituary broadcast prior to an episode of ''Crossroads'' broadcast on 14 April 1985</ref><ref>As noted in BBC One's TV Heros series, 1991</ref> Baird also made the world's first color over-the-air broadcast on 4 February 1938, sending a mechanically scanned 120-line image from Baird's [[The Crystal Palace|Crystal Palace]] studios to a projection screen at London's [[Dominion Theatre]].<ref>Baird Television: [https://www.bairdtelevision.com/crystal-palace-television-studios.html Crystal Palace Television Studios], previous color television demonstrations in the U.K. had been via closed circuit.</ref>

Mechanically scanned color television was also demonstrated by [[Bell Laboratories]] in June 1929 using three complete systems of [[Solar cell|photoelectric cells]], amplifiers, glow-tubes, and color filters, with a series of mirrors to superimpose the red, green, and blue images into one full-color image.