The $14,000 TV With Nothing to Watch: How RCA Threw a Party for America's Most Useless Luxury Purchase

On February 28, 1954, the first color television sets went on sale in America, and they were gloriously, stupendously expensive—retailing for somewhere between $1,000 and $1,300, which translates to roughly $11,000-$14,000 in today's money. For that princely sum, you got a Westinghouse model with a whopping 15-inch screen. The truly delicious irony? There was almost nothing to watch in color. NBC had only just begun broadcasting a few shows in color—perhaps seven hours per week if you were lucky. CBS, still bitter about losing the color TV standards war to RCA's technology, was dragging its feet. Most of what Americans saw on their wallet-crushing new color sets was... black and white programming. But this didn't stop RCA from throwing a lavish party at New York's Plaza Hotel to celebrate the launch, complete with celebrities and self-congratulation. They'd spent decades developing the technology and fighting bitter corporate battles over whose color system would become the industry standard. Now they'd won, and by God, they were going to sell you a television that cost as much as a used car so you could watch "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" in magnificent Technicolor—assuming it aired that week in color, which it probably wouldn't. Only about 5,000 color sets sold in that first year. Americans, it turned out, preferred to wait for both the prices to drop and for there to actually be something worth watching in color. Sensible folk. This content was created in partnership and with the help of Artificial Intelligence AI.