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Nationality: Mexican Guillermo González Camarena (1917-1965), an electrical engineer by trade, invented a chromoscopic converter in 1940 at the age of 23. This device allowed color to be captured by the black and white cameras of the time. For his invention, Camarena became the first person in history to receive a patent for the development of a color television (U.S. Patent 2,296,019). He also filed for additional patents for color television systems in 1960 and 1962. As late as 1979, NASA transmitted photos from Jupiter using his invention. Additionally, he promoted the use of TVs to broadcast educational shows to Mexicans living in rural areas with high rates of illiteracy. He also supported tele-education for students attending medical school. González Camarena transmitted in color for the first time on August 31, 1946, from his lab at the Mexican League of Radio Experiments, located at Lucerna St. #1 in Mexico City. The audio and video signals were sent in the 40-meter band at 115 MHz.
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Nationality: Guatemalan Guatemalan-born Luis von Ahn created the CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA systems for cyber security. To help prevent spam bots from accessing computer systems, CAPTCHA (standing for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”) is a randomly produced challenge-response test. The cyber-security technique was established in 2000 while Von Ahn was a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University. Because Yahoo was struggling with automated spammers, he donated the technology to the company without charge. The system’s upgraded version, reCAPTCHA, is now used by almost all web servers.
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Nationality: Mexican-American According to the Smithsonian Institution, Ellen Ochoa was the first Hispanic woman astronaut. She participated in four NASA missions and spent 978 hours in space. She also contributed to creating three patents in the field of optics. NASA uses her innovations to process data gathered during missions to this very day. Before Ochoa was born, her family, originally from Mexico, relocated to California, where she was born and raised. Ellen studied physics at San Diego State University. She first became interested in optics while a fellowship student at Stanford University. There, she created three inventions that improved the speed and effectiveness of how computers handle information. From 2013 until 2018, Dr. Ochoa served as the director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
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Nationality: Spanish Angela Ruiz Robles (1895-1975) was a pioneer and inventor of the mechanical forerunner of the electronic book. Her mechanical book was created decades before Michael Hart’s Project Gutenberg and is often referred to as the true inventor of the modern e-book. Called the “Enciclopedia Mecánica” (“Mechanical Encyclopedia”), she received several patents for the device. Ruiz received a Spanish patent number of 190,698 in 1949 for devices with buttons that displayed the lesson materials when pressed and engaged. In her second patent, 276,364, granted in 1962, she changed the design by eliminating the buttons and replacing them with rotating reels that displayed the topics and study materials. Ruiz Robles was a dedicated teacher and educator who began her career at a time when only 25% of the female population knew how to read and write. She created the mechanical encyclopedia to reduce the weight of the books that her students had to carry, make studying more appealing, and customize the learning materials to meet the needs of each individual student. Video about Angela Ruiz Robles in Spanish: https://www.rtve.es/play/videos/con-ciencia/ciencia-angela-ruiz-robles/2138256/?t=29s
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Nationality: Peruvian Claudio Castillón Lévano, an engineer from Peru, developed a portable incubator and respirator for premature infants. High-risk infants delivered before full-term gestation can benefit from this discovery by living longer in neonatal intensive care (NICU). After more than 20 years of study and labor by Lévano and his colleagues, the United States granted Lévano’s patent. According to the U.S. Patent Office, Claudio Castillón Lévano was granted U.S. Patent 6,884,211 for a “Neonatal Artificial Bubble” that improves the intensive care of high-risk newborns. Although Lévano’s invention, the Incuven, regulates temperature and lowers the risk of infection for infants, it was not the first ever developed. That honor for the earliest incubator ever developed goes to a device created in 1800s France.
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Nationality: Argentinian Julio Palmaz, a vascular radiologist from Argentina, is credited with advancing the field of angioplasty surgery. This procedure helps clear blocked blood vessels and improves blood flow to the heart. In order to keep heart arteries open after an angioplasty, Palmaz created a balloon-expandable stent in collaboration with physician Richard Schatz. The Palmaz-Schatz Stent was given a patent, Johnson & Johnson, a healthcare provider, provided funding, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved it. Palmaz was admitted to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006.
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