subject: Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena And Color Tv [print this page] Black and white television was a luxury item for many people in the USA up until the 1960s, when color TV finally became available. The purchase of TV sets really took off with the availability of color for home entertainment. Largely forgotten by historians is the Mexican engineer, Guillermo Gonzalez Camarena, who was one of the most noteworthy inventors to develop the color-compatible system, that changed television forever.
Guillermo was born in the early part of the 20th century, and even as a child enjoyed working with electronics. He messed about with making radios at twelve years of age, and at seventeen he invented an early kind of mechanical color TV, called the 'Chromoscopic adapter for television equipment'. He obtained a U.S patent on the design in 1941, a method that allowed the conversion of standard black and white sets. This had previously been a major hurdle for engineers, as the conventional signals operated at a specific frame rate which would not be able to successfully transmit anything but the monochromatic signal.
Gonzalez Camarena's invention used disks and light filters that were colored red, green, and blue, which would be mounted on the camera as well as the receiver. These would spin, traveling past the lens, which would record the image in each successive hue; on the TV set end, each image would be broadcast one at a time, building a full-color frame. Since the spin rate (and thus the transmission rate) was faster than the human eye could track, viewers would just see the final result all at once. Guillermo's patent also described how both discs would turn simultaneously, so that the signal would not be incorrectly broadcast.
In 1946, Gonzalez Camarena sent the first color transmission using his invention, recording it in his lab and sending it to the offices of The Mexican League of Radio Experiments. He also made the first publicly-announced color broadcast in the country, on February 8 1963. He did so on the TV station he'd helped to establish eleven years earlier, XHGC-TV. The United States, Cuba and Japan introduced color TV, but Mexico was next with this innovation by Guillermo. The station is still operational to this day.
Gonzalez Camarena's invention was very similar to a system called field-sequential color; the use of rapid successive images to transmit color, images the human brain fuses together as a single continuous stream, was used by both. This concept was briefly made the official method of transmission in the United States, but was then dropped. The 1979 NASA Voyager mission, however, used a television system that was quite similar to Guillermo's design to capture images and video of the planet Jupiter. Unfortunately, the inventor died in a car accident in 1965, on his way back from inspecting a transmitter in Veracruz. There is a foundation in his name that benefits Mexican inventors, as well as a center at his alma mater, The National Polytechnic Institute, which bears his name.
