Bright Signals: A History of Color Television

Susan Murray will offer the featured author talk at Hagley this fall on her new book Bright Signals: A History of Color Television. Drawing creatively on the David Sarnoff and RCA materials now held by Hagley’s library, Murray will trace color television’s origins as an exotic novelty in the 1920s and 1930s and explain how it became the standard for television programing in the 1960s and 1970s. In a complex story full of vexing technological obstacles, false starts, and indifferent consumers, Murray will describe how major media companies developed effective color programming, affordable color televisions for home use, and generated consumer interest in seeing television programs in color. Color television was an incredibly complex technology of visual culture that ultimately disrupted and reframed the very idea of television for American audiences. Published in 2018, Bright Signals has received the 2019 Katherine Singer Kovacs Book Award of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the 2019 Michael Nelson Book Prize from the International Association for Media and History. Bright Signals is richly illustrated with many images taken from Hagley’s collections.