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Westinghouse probably made the best decision they could at the time. Between the tooling /setup charges at Corning Glass for an all new panel and funnel plus expenses tooling up the CRT plant, it would have been cost prohibitive. Apparently CBS-Hytron was months behind Westinghouse in development and was not yet in a position to share any tooling cost. Also, demand for color sets was low at the time due to lack of programming and there were high costs in purchasing and maintaining color sets. And if it is true that these tubes had to go through a overnight exhaust cycle (a typical cycle at the time was probably no more than three hours) it tells me that rejects were high, life test was poor, and CRT engineering could foresee no easy way to solve these problems, thus putting the cost per good tube out of sight. I have been in CRT engineering for over 36 years and have been in this same position. Believe me. It's no fun. I guess that's why they call it work.
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