{J} 11: The forgotten inventor of color TV
Postcard 001: to Holden from a window overlooking a pool
Hey friend, Julian’s is a travel handbook in the making. In between longer travel articles about Mexico City, we’ll also be sending brief letters about our day to day walks around the town and country. Each letter is addressed to an actual, IRL person and accompanied by an actual, IRL postcard to that person. Want a postcard from Mexico? Leave a comment. I’ll pick one person at random to send to next.
It’s easy to forget that television is an illusion, that for almost a century now we’ve been staring at a trick, at invisible waves, at the jiggling of spectrum in the ether, at an empty box. It may be all digital now, of course, but the same principle applies. Red and green and blue, pixeled into patterns, compressed, decompressed, and shot into our eyeballs, where we interpret it. Where we decide what it means. The mind is a making up machine. When we look at TV, at a show or a movie, we’re literally making up what others have made up for us—taking, direct to the face, their fiction of colors.
Speaking of colors: I saw the most colorful thing, recently. It wasn’t playing on a screen, but it was hanging on a wall, in El Castillo de Chapultepec. More of a palace, rather than a castle, seems to me, but then I don’t have the bona fides to really pick that nit. Regardless, when you come here next, we’ll go there. It’s on a hill overlooking the city, near where Monteczuma took his baths. Walk up the steep drive, buy your 20 peso ticket at the booth, enter the neoclassical-by-way-of-baroque building, climb the marble stairs—admire, while you’re at it, the neo-gothic vaulted ceilings; no style spared in this castle!—and take a right into Room 2. There you’ll find a mural called La Fusión de dos Culturas.
Huge, this thing!
All blood and feathers.
There’s an Eagle Knight in the middle, wearing a gold and ochre armor of scales and plumes, leaping onto a steel blue conquistador and being stabbed through—straight through!—with the conquistador’s white-as-white-can-be sword. Eagle Knight doesn’t seem to care, though; he’s grabbing the Spaniard by the helmet and thrusting a spear through his neck. Feels like it’s moving, this mural, like it’s all in motion, but that’s an illusion, just like our TV. This whole scene is all happening on the back of a horse btw, a horse that’s rearing back, his armored head turned in profile to the viewer, and you can see the horse’s one wide and surprised red eye, as if to say, bro! The background is blood and flags.
You don’t hear the painter’s name, that often, in Mexico: Jorge González Camarena. Or at least I don’t. All the tourists and tour guides are too busy with the big muralists: Riviera, Orozco, Siqueiros. But Camarena’s the one who brought color to Mexican muralism. He was obsessed with natural pigments and inspired by the tlacuilo, the writer-painters of ancient pre-conquest Mexico, the ones who wrote the codices and painted Monteczuma’s stories. While Rivera was painting patriotic odes to the United States of Mexico, Camarena was bringing vibrant life the violent collision of two cultures—Mexica and Spanish—that created, big bang-like, the technicolor culture of Mexico today.
And so isn’t it a fun coincidence, or maybe a fun alignment of invisible waves, that Camarena’s brother invented the first system for transmitting color television. Guillermo González Camarena invented a two-wheel, wood and lens adaptor called El Adaptador Cromoscópico para Aparatos de Televisión. It was patented in Mexico in 1940 and two years later in the US, right as World War II began. Many men competed to shoot color through the air, back in the 30s and 40s—Baird and Farnsworth and Valensi and more—but it’s Camarena who’s remembered in Mexico, though he’s obscure to the rest of the world.
Camarena’s system was used in Mexico for a few decades, beginning with the first color broadcast in Mexico in 1963—ParaÃso Infantil, or Children’s Paradise. His work never took off in the U.S., though. Eventually the U.S. settled on the NTSC standard. Camarena died in 1965, after which Mexico decided to adopt the NTSC as well.
But I mean, what are the odds? One brother paints with pigments the collision of culture, another paints with light the collision of photons. Both famous.
Anyway as I write this I am looking out the window at a swimming pool, finishing the last salty drops of a margarita, the international drink of gringos. Sunny outside. The rain is supposed to start in a few weeks, but it gets later every year. Hope you’re well. Hope you have a good window to look out of. Hope you’re not stuck inside watching TV.
-s.
Postcard to Holden overlooking a pool
🌙 What is Julian’s?
Julian’s is a deep time handbook for curious travelers. Julian’s is written by Steve Bryant, who lives and works in Mexico City. More about Steve at thisisdelightful.com.