Guillermo González Camarena

Guillermo González Camarena was born in Guadalajara in 1917, the youngest of seven children, and grew up in Mexico City after his father died. He built electric toys as a boy and a radio transmitter before he was fifteen. He studied at the National Polytechnic Institute and got work at the government\'s radio station, where he spent his wages on parts from second-hand markets.

Television in the 1930s was an experiment in a few rich countries. Working in his own time with no laboratory and no budget, he built a camera and receiver from salvaged components and had them working by 1934. He then tackled colour. His approach spun a disc with red, green and blue filters in front of the camera and another in front of the screen, in step, so that the eye blended the three images into one. He was granted a Mexican patent in 1940 and a United States patent in 1942, at the age of 25.

He carried out early colour transmissions from his laboratory in 1946 and founded Channel 5 in Mexico City in 1952, one of the first television stations in Latin America. He also composed popular songs, and used his broadcasts to carry education into rural areas. A field-sequential colour system of the same kind was later used to send pictures back from Jupiter.

He was killed in April 1965, aged 48, when his car crashed in Puebla on the way back from inspecting a transmitter in Veracruz.