By Siobhan Mcdonough
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Doreen Golanoski remembers being a little girl when her family's television set delivered something new and amazing to her eyes - a burst of color on the screen. Finally, she could see The Jetsons in vivid greens, blues, reds.

"You can't really appreciate color television unless you know what it was like to watch black-and-white," said Golanoski, who has five sets in her Nanticoke, Pa., home, on the cusp of the 50th anniversary of color television.

March 25, 1954, the Radio Corporation of America began manufacturing color television sets at its Bloomington, Ind., plant. It built 5,000 sets with 12-inch screens, known as the model CT-100 color receiver. They sold for $1,000 each, astronomical in those days.

They didn't get much use that year, since color telecasts were so rare. But the American love affair with the tube had taken a leap forward into the hues of real life.

The effort to bring color to the home screen occupied scientists throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s at RCA laboratories in Princeton, N.J. Their eventual concoction sounded like something out of a science fiction novel - the three-beam shadow mask tube.

The struggle for a clear and true color picture was hardly over. RCA continually tweaked the technology behind it all, and soon replaced the original combination of phosphate, silicate and sulfide phosphors with a more efficient group made up entirely of sulfides.

After a CBS experimental start, NBC, a subsidiary of RCA, developed and promoted color television in the marketplace. Ten years later, NBC was broadcasting as many as 40 hours a week in color.

The first 5,000 color sets were gobbled up by consumers. In 1967, color outsold black-and-white for the first time - with more than 5.5 million sets sold - and in 1973, more than half of all households had color.

Many people remember the day they tuned in to color.

"Everyone was piling into my mother's room" to watch the new color set there, said Jermaine Johnson, 28, of Washington.

"I felt like we finally stepped up, we moved up a notch," he said. For him, it was 1987 - well after color TV made its introduction.

U.S. households had 248 million TV sets in 2001, or 2.4 sets each on average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, citing the latest year measured.

The Consumer Electronics Association projects that more than 18 million color sets and about 150,000 black-and-white sets will be sold this year.

TV ownership blanketed the country as far back as 1960, when 87 percent of homes had one, according to the bureau. Now they are nearly universal, in more than 98 percent of homes.

And, increasingly, in cars.

Golanoski, 48, who has TVs in her living room, basement and three bedrooms, is ready to impart her appreciation of the tube on younger generations.

During an excursion with her stepdaughter, Golanoski shopped for a portable television for the minivan to keep her granddaughter amused during long road trips.

"We need to see each other more often and we need a television for the car so we can accomplish that," Golanoski explained.

Adults are projected to watch, on average, 1,669 hours of television in 2004 - roughly 70 days' worth, according to census figures.

Frank Vespe, executive director of TV-Turnoff Network, a group that tries to get people to do just that, is not cheering color television's big anniversary.

"Television has supplanted just about every other leisure activity," he lamented.