In 1946, CBS approached the Federal Communications Commission with a giant improvement to a technology that had just debuted seven years earlier — the commission watched a CBS presentation of color television.

The one problem with the system: It was incompatible with RCA’s standard, and that meant no RCA-format television would be able to pick up the color broadcasts. Even though the commission gave the go-ahead to CBS, RCA tied the issue up in courts for years. By 1953, the passage of time had caused the RCA-format television set to be so ingrained a standard that the FCC reversed itself. Color television, in any format, would not come about until the mid-1960s, and then in a format black-and-white sets would still be able to pick up.

The above story is enlightening because a half-century later, the FCC is going to do nearly the opposite. On Oct. 29, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that all but the smallest televisions on the market must be able to receive digital signals by July 2007. Why? Because the analog waves are going to be nothing but dead air in December 2006 by congressional decree.

The 15 percent of Americans receiving TV signals with rabbit ears or rooftop antennas are going to be left out in the cold, and millions of televisions — millions more than would have been affected by a switch to color in the early 1950s — will cease to be useful.

That last paragraph is worth restating: In 38 months, if you don’t get cable or satellite, your television won’t work. None of your televisions will work, period. If you do get cable or satellite, but not every television is hooked up to it, those not hooked up won’t work either.

Unless, that is, you buy a tuner or a new set, but not right now because the TV you buy today may not work in 2007. But what does this switch mean for TVs you already have?

I can think of two standard sets at home that will never work again because they don’t even have a coax port. There’s also an older, trusty portable black-and-white set, used to view many a football game while in the Jack Trice Stadium parking lot that won’t have a way to view the 2007 Super Bowl. And unless I get cable, the TV card in my computer won’t work either.

An article from the Minneapolis Star-Tribune estimates at 2.6 sets per household, this will lead to 40 million televisions being obsolete in the next three years. Forty million sets will become paperweights and landfill fodder.

According to an Associated Press article about the appeals court’s decision, those getting their feed from satellite and cable won’t have to worry, but the article didn’t go into specifics beyond that. This may mean that all the programs will be in widescreen, to match HDTV dimensions, but the set itself will still work.

But a significant percentage of the country still sticks to the Big Four (plus PBS and assorted WB/UPN outlets). Unless the Democrats decide to declare cable TV a fundamental human right, a lot of people are going to be forced to pay for what they had already by buying a new television/tuner — or two, or three.

The Star-Tribune quoted Bruce Jacobs, chief technologist for Twin Cities Public Television, as saying this about the 85 percent of cable/satellite users: “Do they want to continue watching television as they experience it today? If they’ve got cable or direct broadcast satellite, they’ve got nothing to worry about. But do they want better pictures? If they want better pictures, they definitely need a new display. Their old television set — they can’t suddenly make it magically have better pictures.” In other words, nearly all the current TVs out there will be carrying an inferior transmission, which is better than none at all. But the urge to get new sets will be powerful.

Planned obsolescence is something we have been trained to accept in cars, computers and now, in some cases, phones. But this is television we’re talking about. Never before has so much been set to become so obsolete so immediately. Old cars can still be driven and old computers can still be used. But TVs without a digital tuner won’t be able to do anything except play videotapes.

If you picked up a brand-new television set in eastern Iowa in the fall of 1953, you could have caught KWWL, KCRG and WMT (now KGAN) all making their very first TV broadcasts. In 2003, as those stations and many others across the country celebrate their 50th anniversaries, assuming the set was still in working order, you could still watch them on it.

But sometime soon after Dick Clark drops the ball for 2007, that set and millions of others made after it will be fit to show nothing but static.