The World Saw in Black and White in 1940 — Until a 23-Year-Old Mexican Created Color TV.

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The Color Revolution: The Inspiring Story of Guillermo González Camarena

For decades, the world believed that color television was an invention of major American corporations like RCA, CBS, and Westinghouse—giants of technology with their multimillion-dollar laboratories in New York, hundreds of engineers, and direct connections to the government. However, in 1938, something extraordinary was happening far away from those corporate towers.

In a modest workshop in Mexico City, a 21-year-old named Guillermo González Camarena was working alone, without funding, professional laboratories, or access to the secret patents of these corporations. He was on the brink of solving a problem that the most powerful companies in the world could not decipher. What he achieved that year not only changed television technology but also reshaped what we believed was possible.

While RCA and CBS were spending millions of dollars on their color television projects, Guillermo was experimenting with old radio parts in his small workshop. Two years later, he would file a patent just ten days before CBS made its first public demonstration of color television. This is his story—the story that corporations never wanted you to know.

The World of 1938

To understand Guillermo’s achievement, one must grasp the world he lived in. In 1938, television was in its infancy. The first public broadcasts had started only two years earlier in Germany, and everything was in black and white. Flickering ghostly images appeared on screens, and only a few thousand families in New York owned televisions. They were expensive, and the quality was terrible. Engineers knew the future lay in color, but no one knew how to achieve it.

In New York, RCA had hundreds of engineers working on the problem with a budget of millions of dollars. In February 1940, they conducted a private demonstration for the Federal Communications Commission, which ended in disaster. David Sarnoff, RCA’s powerful president, canceled the public demonstration immediately and sent his engineers back to Princeton with a clear order: don’t come out until it works.

Guillermo’s Early Years

While all this was happening in the affluent laboratories of New York, something different was unfolding in Mexico. Guillermo González Camarena was born on February 17, 1917, in Guadalajara. He was the youngest of seven siblings, and when he was just two years old, his father passed away. The family moved to Mexico City in search of better opportunities, setting the stage for Guillermo’s extraordinary journey.

As a child, while other kids played in the streets, Guillermo locked himself in the basement of his home. By the age of eight, he built his first radio transmitter using parts he scavenged from the trash. By twelve, he had his own amateur radio station up and running. His neighbors regarded him as a strange boy, obsessed with wires and electrical circuits. But Guillermo was not playing; he was learning.

He devoured technical books on radio and electricity, teaching himself everything he could because his family could not afford professional equipment. At just thirteen, he enrolled in a school for mechanical and electrical engineers, where his life changed forever. For the first time, he saw television. His professor had brought experimental equipment from the United States. When Guillermo witnessed those first black-and-white images on the screen, his mind exploded. He would often say, “I dream in black and white.” It was then he made a decision: if television existed in black and white, it must be possible to see it in color.

The Challenge of Color

At seventeen, Guillermo found his obsession. But creating color television was not simply about adding colors; it was brutally complex. Black-and-white television transmits a single channel of information—light and darkness. Simple. However, human color perception relies on three primary colors: red, green, and blue. This meant capturing three images simultaneously, encoding them without interference, transmitting them through the air, synchronizing them perfectly at the receiver, and reconstructing the color image—all with 1938 technology, without computers or transistors, just vacuum tubes and mechanical components.

While the most powerful corporations in the world had armies of engineers tackling this issue, Guillermo was working alone in a makeshift workshop. Yet he had something they did not: a brilliant idea.

In 1938, while experimenting in his workshop, Guillermo had a revelation. All the corporations were trying to transmit the three colors simultaneously, requiring incredibly complex and costly technology. Guillermo thought differently. What if he transmitted the three colors one after the other, so quickly that the human eye wouldn’t notice the difference?

He designed a brilliant solution: a disc with three transparent color filters—red, green, and blue. The disc would spin in front of the camera at high speed, capturing the scene three times, once for each color. The three images would be transmitted sequentially. At the receiving television, another identical disc would spin simultaneously, perfectly synchronized. When the three images reached the screen and passed through the filters, the human eye would perceive them as a single full-color image.

It was simple, elegant, and economical to build. Most importantly, it worked. Guillermo constructed every piece by hand: the discs, the filters, the synchronization system—everything.

A Historic Patent

In 1938, at just 21 years old, he succeeded. He tested his invention in his home on Abre Street 74 in the Juárez neighborhood. His brother Jorge, a well-known painter and muralist, was likely the first person in history to see color television, and it worked.

But now came the hard part: protecting his invention. On August 19, 1940, Guillermo walked into the patent office in Mexico, carrying the blueprints of his invention. He was nervous, knowing that what he was about to register could change history. He filed his patent application number 234235, the technical name for his magical disc system.

Ten days later, on August 29, 1940, CBS conducted its first public demonstration of color television in New York. Hungarian engineer Peter Carl Goldmark presented a system that used the same principle—a rotating mechanical disc with color filters—but there was a crucial difference. Goldmark worked for a corporation with an unlimited budget, while Guillermo worked alone in Mexico and had arrived first.

On September 15, 1942, Guillermo received U.S. Patent 2,296,19. A young Mexican, just 23 years old, had patented a color television system in the United States before the most powerful corporations in the world. It was an absolute triumph, but Guillermo did not know that his real battle was just beginning.

The Struggle for Recognition

Guillermo González Camarena had defeated the giants. He had the patent, the functional technology, and official recognition. Everything seemed perfect, but he faced an unforeseen problem that had nothing to do with engineering and would change everything.

In 1946, he conducted public demonstrations in Mexico. In 1951, he broadcast color surgeries from Juárez Hospital. In 1952, he founded Channel 5. In 1963, he made the first commercial color television broadcast in Mexico. His technology worked, was used, and respected. Even NASA used a similar system in 1979 for the Voyager missions to photograph Jupiter because his sequential method captured more accurate colors for scientific purposes.

Guillermo was winning. But while all this was happening in Mexico, RCA and CBS were fiercely battling for market control in the United States, and therein lay the problem. In the world of technology, the best inventor does not always win; the one with the most money does.

In 1950, the Federal Communications Commission temporarily approved CBS’s system, the same sequential principle that Guillermo and Goldmark had developed. It seemed the rotating disc had won, but CBS’s system had a fatal flaw: it was incompatible with the millions of existing black-and-white televisions in the United States. People would have to buy new sets.

RCA, on the other hand, had developed a completely different system—the NTSC, electronic, complex, and costly, but compatible with older televisions. In 1953, the FCC reversed its decision and adopted RCA’s NTSC as the U.S. standard. Not because it was technically superior, but because RCA had the power to manufacture millions of televisions, convince networks, and dominate the market.

Guillermo received offers from U.S. universities and private investors, some for enormous sums of money. He rejected them all. Why? Because he wanted his invention to develop in Mexico. He wanted his country to be the first to enjoy mass color television. It was pure patriotism, and it cost him global recognition because, without the backing of a multimillion-dollar corporation, inventors are forgotten—not because their work isn’t important, but because history is written by those with the money to tell it.

A Life of Innovation and Tragedy

Guillermo was much more than an inventor; he was a composer. His song “Río Colorado” was a commercial success, and the royalties financed much of his research. He was an amateur astronomer, spending countless nights observing the stars with his own telescope. He was passionate about Mexican history and customs and, above all, a visionary in education.

He believed that television should not just be entertainment; it should educate, enlighten, and reach places where teachers were absent. He worked with the Ministry of Public Education to develop a secondary education system transmitted by television for rural communities. Today, millions of students in Mexico continue to receive education thanks to that system.

For all these contributions, he received the Order of the Aztec Eagle, Mexico’s highest civilian decoration. But his life ended abruptly on April 18, 1965, in a car accident in Cerro de las Lajas, Veracruz, while inspecting a transmitter for Channel 5. He died doing what he loved. Just ten days before, he had presented his last invention at the New York World’s Fair, a simplified two-color system designed to bring color television to the world’s poorest communities.

His death left that dream unfulfilled, but he left something much more valuable: an example. For decades, the world saw in black and white—not just on screens but in its imagination. It believed that innovation could only come from certain places, certain companies, certain countries, from laboratories with multimillion-dollar budgets—until a 21-year-old Mexican proved otherwise.

Working alone in a makeshift workshop, with more talent than resources, more obsession than budget, and more vision than an entire industry, Guillermo demonstrated that the problem was never technology; it was a lack of imagination and belief that someone like him could solve what the giants could not.

He did it with a rotating disc, three color filters, and a brilliant idea. Guillermo González Camarena not only created color television; he created proof that human ingenuity knows no borders, that true innovation does not arise from million-dollar budgets but from obsession, curiosity, and courage.

And that lesson is worth more than any patent because every time a young engineer thinks, “This is impossible without resources,” every time an inventor faces giant corporations, every time someone doubts that innovation can come from unexpected places, Guillermo’s legacy is there to remind us: yes, it can be done—not because it’s easy, but because someone already proved it at 21 in a workshop in Mexico.

Guillermo González Camarena. February 17, 1917 – April 18, 1965. The young man who brought color to the world and taught us that dreams do not recognize budgets, borders, or impossibilities.