History of RGB
The RGB color model is based on the Young–Helmholtz theory of trichromatic color vision, developed by Thomas Young and Hermann Helmholtz, in the early to mid nineteenth century, and on James Clerk Maxwell's color triangle that elaborated that theory (circa 1860).
Photography
First experiments with RGB in early color photography were made in 1861 by Maxwell himself, and involved the process of three color-filtered separate takes. To reproduce the color photograph, three matching projections over a screen in a dark room were necessary.
The additive RGB model and variants such as orange–green–violet were also used in the Autochrome Lumière color plates and other screen-plate technologies such as the Joly color screen and the Paget process in the early twentieth century. Color photography by taking three separate plates was used by other pioneers, such as Russian Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky in the period 1909 through 1915. Such methods last until about 1960 using the expensive and extremely complex tri-color carbro Autotype process.
When employed, the reproduction of prints from three-plate photos was done by dyes or pigments using the complementary CMY model, by simply using the negative plates of the filtered takes: reverse red gives the cyan plate, and so on.
Television
In pre-electronics, patents on mechanically scanned color systems exist since 1889 in Russia. The color TV pioneer John Logie Baird demonstrated the world's first RGB color transmission in 1928, and also the world's first color broadcast in 1938, in London. In his experiments, scanning and displaying were made by mechanical means through spinning colorized wheels.
The Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) began experimental RGB field-sequential color system in 1940. Images were electronically scanned, but it still used a moving part: the transparent RGB color wheel rotating at above 1,200 rpm synchronized in front of both the monochromatic camera and the cathode-ray tube (CRT) receiver counterpart.
The modern RGB shadow mask technology for color CRT displays was patented by Werner Flechsig in Germany in 1938.
Personal computers
Early personal computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as those from Apple, Atari and Commodore, do not use RGB as their main method to manage colors, but rather composite video. IBM introduced a 16-color scheme (one bit each for RGB and Intensity) with the Color Graphics Adapter (CGA) for its first IBM PC (1981), later improved with the Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) in 1984. The first manufacturer of a truecolor graphic card for PCs (the TARGA) was Truevision in 1987, but was not until the arrival of the Video Graphics Array (VGA) in 1988 that RGB became popular, mainly due to the analog signals in the connection between the adapter and the monitor which allowed a very wide range of RGB colors.