Notes on a brilliant failure

Roebke replies: I’m thankful that Istvan Gorog read my article until its end; he was, he confessed, pleased rather than shocked until its final paragraphs.

I did not write a history of the color television industry. My article told the story of one unheralded company and the physicists who worked on its color televisions, in their spare time, while building particle accelerators for both national defense and empirical pleasure. It was the story of the Chromatron, not RCA and the Trinitron.

Gorog was not just an alumnus of the TV industry. He was a director at RCA. So he objected when, in my denouement, I mentioned that the Trinitron was the best-selling television when most of us were growing up. In the 1990s, when I was growing up, it was.

In his letter, Gorog conflated tubes and televisions. But the first was mere synecdoche for the second. Sony built televisions from its tubes. RCA often licensed those components to other television manufacturers, so as not to manufacture all those televisions itself.

Gorog also demurred when I noted that the Trinitron had a single beam source. But it originally had a single electron gun. In the 1970s Sony even advertised “The Beauty of One Gun” as the Trinitron’s distinctive feature. The veracity of my supposed inaccuracies is well documented.

Gorog then recapitulated what I wrote about grids and masks, albeit more technically and for the Trinitron rather than the Chromatron, which was the subject of my article. He distinguished the specifications of the Trinitron and RCA’s tubes fluently. But he was an expert on such tubes when I was still sitting at home and watching television.