Today we are used to very high definition, giant screens and even connected television, the so-called smart TV. But color TV, which now seems obvious to us but was then a real revolution, arrived in Italy only in 1977, very late compared to the rest of the western world: the very first color television was in fact sold exactly 67 years ago, December 30, 1953. It was sold in the United States, where experimentation had begun in the 40s, priced at around $ 1.175, which represents the equivalent of about 9.000 dollars today, a figure that now seems exorbitant for such a device, if we consider that today with 100 euros you can take home a 40-inch HD TV.
To produce the first color TV sold was the Admiral Corporation, historic US brand that was taken over by Whirlpool in 1991, while on the Italian and European markets it had already ended up in crisis and disappeared in the 80s. Regular color broadcasts always began in the United States in the year that would begin a few days after the first sales, 1954, therefore a good 23 years earlier than in Italy, which it will welcome the colors only in 1977, despite the fact that Rai was technically able to broadcast in color since 1961 (at the birth of the second channel). The delay occurred for political reasons: in that period there was a long debate in Parliament on the choice of which system to adopt, the French SECAM or the German PAL
Even the Italian automotive industry, very influential in those years, opposed it, worried that color TV could represent a new durable consumer good and therefore constitute a dangerous alternative to buying a second car. The controversy had the consequence of leaving Italy out of the world for years and above all causing the electronics industry to go bankrupt, which on the one hand it could not yet produce color televisionson the other hand, it no longer sold black and white devices, which had long since entered Italian homes and no longer represented an important business.
