Today in Technology History

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March 31

Exactly one year ago, engineer Henry J. Kasperowicz died. His greatest invention, the three-color television tube, played a big part in the transition from black-and-white to color TV.

Kasperowicz was born in 1917 in Hoboken, New Jersey, and he graduated from the Stevens Institute of Technology in that city. During World War II, he developed a black grid background that made it easier to read radar screens, even inside sunny airplane cockpits.

He later took a job at the DuMont Laboratories run by Allen B. DuMont, the television pioneer who manufactured TV sets and started the world's first commercial TV network. Although black-and-white TV was just barely starting to catch on in the U.S., DuMont's company was one of several that were already trying to develop color TV.

Kasperowicz was about 30 years old when he invented a new kind of television tube, one that produced three colors: red, blue and green. Those colors, in various combinations, could be used to produce the many other colors in a picture or a scene. That basic system has been used for decades in most TVs and computer screens; if you ever notice an "RGB" setting for your computer monitor, that's a reference to the red, blue and green color components.

Kasperowicz's new color TV tube was apparently designed so that it could be inserted into an existing TV set, just replacing the old black-and-white tube. He received a patent in 1950, but color TV didn't actually catch on for several years. He later founded his own company to develop cathode ray tubes for the government. In later years, he worked on electron beam lithography, a technique used to produce incredibly tiny electronics parts.

Henry Kasperowicz died on March 31, 2002, at the age of 84.

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