If you ask a random person on the street who the TV a color inventor was, they’ll probably blink and guess someone like RCA or maybe a guy in a lab coat at Westinghouse. Most people assume color television was just a natural, corporate evolution of the black-and-white sets gathering dust in 1940s living rooms.
The reality is way more interesting. It involves a teenager in Mexico City scavenging for parts in flea markets and a patent war that stretched across borders.
Guillermo González Camarena wasn't a corporate titan. He was a kid with a soldering iron and a vision. In 1940, at just 23 years old, he filed for a patent that would fundamentally change how we see the world through a screen. Honestly, the fact that his name isn't as synonymous with "TV" as Edison is with the lightbulb is kind of a tragedy.
The Kid Who Built a Rainbow
Let’s get one thing straight: nobody "invented" color TV on a Tuesday afternoon and had it in stores by Friday. It was a messy, incremental process involving multiple brilliant minds like Peter Goldmark at CBS and the engineering teams at RCA. But González Camarena holds a special place in this timeline.
By the age of 12, he was already building his own radio transmitter. While other kids were playing outside, he was obsessed with the idea that images shouldn't be trapped in grayscale. He basically spent his late teens tinkering with a "Trichromatic Sequential System."
It sounds fancy. It was actually genius in its simplicity.
He used a disk with red, green, and blue filters that spun in front of the camera lens and another that spun in sync in front of the receiver. If you spin them fast enough, the human eye does the heavy lifting. Our brains fuse those flickering colors into a single, full-color image. He wasn't just a TV a color inventor; he was a pioneer of human perception.
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His 1940 patent (US Patent 2,296,019) was the first of its kind to be granted in both Mexico and the United States for a system that was actually functional and relatively affordable.
Why the World Ignored Mexico’s Genius
You’ve got to wonder why we don't talk about this more. Politics. Money. The usual suspects.
During the 1940s and 50s, the US was the center of the media universe. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) was caught in a brutal tug-of-war. On one side, you had CBS pushing for a "mechanical" color system—very similar to what González Camarena developed. On the other side was RCA, which wanted an "all-electronic" system that would be compatible with existing black-and-white TVs.
RCA won.
Because the RCA system didn't require a spinning wheel inside your TV, it became the commercial standard. González Camarena’s system was temporarily sidelined for home use, but it didn't die. Far from it.
The NASA Connection
Here is the kicker that most people get wrong. While the "mechanical" system was deemed too clunky for your living room, it was perfect for space.
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When NASA sent the Voyager mission out into the deep reaches of the solar system, they needed a way to send color images back to Earth that wouldn't consume massive amounts of power or bandwidth. They used a simplified version of the sequential color system.
The photos you see of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot or the rings of Saturn? You can trace the lineage of those images directly back to the work of the TV a color inventor from Mexico City. It’s wild to think that a system rejected for being "obsolete" ended up being the eyes of humanity in deep space.
Complexity and Nuance: It Wasn’t Just One Guy
To be intellectually honest, we have to acknowledge that González Camarena didn't work in a vacuum. John Logie Baird in Scotland was messing with color as early as 1928. However, Baird’s early versions were barely watchable. They were flickery, blurry messes.
What made González Camarena different was the stability of his system. He understood the math. He understood the timing.
- 1934: He builds his first black-and-white camera.
- 1940: Patent for the "Trichromatic" system is filed.
- 1946: He launches XE1GC, the first experimental color station in Mexico.
- 1963: He introduces the "Simplified Bicolor System," which was even easier to produce.
He was also a songwriter. Seriously. He wrote a hit song called "Río Colorado" and used the royalties to fund his experiments. How many engineers do you know who fund their patents with pop music residuals?
The Tragic End and Lasting Legacy
Guillermo González Camarena died in a car accident in 1965. He was only 48.
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At the time, he was still refining his systems, trying to make TV accessible to the masses in rural Mexico through educational programming. He believed television was a tool for literacy, not just a box for selling soap.
When we talk about the TV a color inventor, we are talking about a man who turned down massive offers from American companies because he wanted the patents to benefit his home country. He wanted "Made in Mexico" to mean something in the high-tech world.
Today, your OLED screen uses a completely different technology, but the fundamental principle of RGB (Red, Green, Blue) remains the bedrock of everything we see. Whether you are scrolling on TikTok or watching a movie in IMAX, you are using the logic that a 23-year-old kid mapped out in 1940.
How to Explore This History Further
If you want to move beyond the surface-level history of television, there are actual steps you can take to see this tech in action.
- Visit the Museo de la Radio y la Televisión: If you ever find yourself in Mexico City, this is a pilgrimage site for tech nerds. You can see some of the original equipment González Camarena built by hand.
- Research the NTSC vs. PAL Divide: To understand why color TV took so long to standardize, look into the "Never Twice the Same Color" (NTSC) jokes from the 1960s. It highlights the massive engineering hurdles González Camarena was trying to solve.
- Look Up US Patent 2,296,019: Go to Google Patents and actually read the filing. Seeing the hand-drawn diagrams of the color wheels makes the genius of the system much more tangible than just reading about it.
- Support Local Innovation: González Camarena’s story is a reminder that the next world-changing tech doesn't always come from a billion-dollar lab in Silicon Valley. It often starts in a garage with a person who refuses to believe that "the way things are" is the way they have to be.
The next time you see a vivid, high-definition sunset on your screen, remember the kid with the spinning glass disks. He saw the color before anyone else did.