It was on September 28, 1951 that CBS, then perhaps still known as the Columbia Broadcasting System, sent the first color televisions to retail stores ... only to cease those sales on month later and, as Wikipedia tells us, recall as many as they could of the 200 sold as soon as possible. CBS was able to broadcast in color, but the fact that nobody had televisions that could receive and display color was clearly a major drawback. Getting color televisions out to the public definitely made sense. But it seems that there was a sort-of bootstrapping problem with that project. Even with the marketing of those first color televisions very few people had them in their homes and the advertisers, a major source of income for CBS, didn't see any point in advertising to a non-existent audience and didn't support the color programming.

To my mind there's something very comforting in this historic vignette. Most histories of the development of new technologies adhere to a narrative of an unrestrained forward march. Once a technology takes off, there's no stopping it. So even if that first retailing of color televisions was only a glitch in ... well, in an unrestrained forward march, it hints at the necessary interaction between technological, social and market factors that ultimately define the ways in which a technology gets integrated into a society.