[Steve D.]

Evidently Ben & etype2 skipped over my posted Dec.31, 1953 Admiral article on my post. The ongoing discussion on who first offered consumer color sets for public sale has been going on for years. Many maintain Admiral based on the early dates mentioned in newspaper articles was 1st. Some credit Westinghouse who built 500 15" sets and only sold one set in the 1st month in NYC despite heavy NYC advertising. Most favor RCA due to the much higher production run. GE also had a pilot run of sets early on. I could find no ads for GE sets. Due to the high price, a small viewing screen and very limited color broadcasts, none of these manufactures saw any real success. They lost money on every set sold. RCA, because of it's heavy advertising & promotion fared the best but quickly discounted it's price by 50% to move the sets out of dealer stocks. They later did a buy back of their CT-100 sets as the 21" color sets became available in Dec. 1954. Many other manufacturers also had limited pilot production runs given to distributors to showcase that they were able to produce color televisions. Many of these sets were on public display at high end dealers for the Jan, 1st 1954 color telecast of the Rose Parade. This in cities that were able to transmit color programs at the time. I personally believe that Westinghouse wins the prize for 1st place in offering color TV in, at least in small quantities. Their early advertising is well documented. Ads from 2-28-54:

-Steve D.