By the 1950s, television had become the national nightly pastime, but tiny screens and monochrome pictures left viewers itching for improvement. Color was the obvious next step, and by 1954 the technical challenges of broadcasting in full color had been overcome. RCA gave America a way to watch the new waves, that same year releasing the CT-100 — an enormously complex device that required two sets of circuits, one for color, one for B&W. Alas, it met with little success in the market. Picture quality was poor; images were blurry and ghosted. "Only an inveterate (and well-heeled) experimenter should let the advertisements seduce him into being 'among the very first' to own a color TV set," sniffed Consumer Reports. Yet more than 50 years later, Wired readers voted the CT-100 the Greatest Gadget of All Time for launching television as we know it today.

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