Mondo Knows Facts
Colour picture tubes aimed three beams through a mask
A perforated steel sheet kept each electron beam landing on its own colour dots RCA's shadow-mask tube, sold from the early 1950s, fired three electron guns at a screen of red, green and blue phosphor dots. A perforated mask sat just behind the glass so each beam could only reach dots of its own colour. The three colours merged in the eye when viewed from a distance. It sits in Mondo's movies & tv collection, one of 200 facts that each trace back to the reference below.
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More facts like this
American colour television was standardised in 1953The FCC approved a compatible system that black-and-white sets could still receiveBBC Two began colour broadcasts in 1967Britain launched a full 625-line colour service on BBC Two in 1967A colorist grades the finished pictureThey even out colour and brightness shot by shot so the cuts do not jarSilent films were coloured by hand through stencilsWorkers painted dye onto the frames using a separate stencil for each colourTechnicolor used a prism to split light three waysOne camera exposed three strips of film, one for each primary colourA Trip to the Moon was tinted by handSome prints were hand-tinted by a workshop of women painters
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Tags: television, colour, crt
Colour picture tubes aimed three beams through a mask: the short answers
- Where does this come from, and can I check it?
- A perforated steel sheet kept each electron beam landing on its own colour dots. The figure is taken from Encyclopaedia Britannica, which is linked in full on this page. Every fact on Mondo Knows names its source rather than repeating an unsourced claim.
- Is this really a movies & tv fact?
- Yes. It sits on the Movies & TV shelf, one of 2,600 sourced facts grouped into space, animals, the human body, history, science and more. Category pages collect every fact in the same field.
- What else can I read about it?
- The links under the fact point to a quiz, game, puzzle or calculator on the same subject, and the shelf below shows related facts. The wording here is original, and quoted phrases are marked as quotations.