Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena

Celebrating Hipsanic Heritage Month

Guillermo+Gonzalez+Camarena

Vanessa Medina, Staff Writer

Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena was a Mexican electrical engineer. He invented the  Trichromatic Sequential Fields System from primary colors. He actually created this system before John Logie Baird’s colored tv, making Camarena actually the first to invent color television.  Camarena was born on February 17, 1917 in Guadalajara, Jalisco. In 1934, at the age of 17, he built his own television camera. At age 23, he was granted the patent to create the Trichromatic Sequential Fields System and worked on making it adaptable to the black and white system of the time. He then went on to manufacture his own telescope that became part of Mexico’s Astronomy Association.

Even though he had started his own color television system in the early 30s, it wasn’t until 1960 that he was able to transmit his first color images in Guadalajara. The color systems used in the CBS  model on the early 50s in the US were incompatible to the decade’s black and white television sets already own by thousands of citizens across the nation. Because the companies wanted to create profit from color tv shows, the demand for a black and white set adaptable system grew. Such a system had already been invented by the likes of Camarena. Although his invention wasn’t the system used for the first color broadcast, he was the first to create color tv.  The magic of color that brightens the TV watching experience gives pride to our Mexican heritage.