4 Tech Inventions by Hispanic Innovators
Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month with The Coding Space
From your home office to the NICU, the innovations of Hispanic inventors make your life healthier and more convenient every day! To celebrate the contributions of Hispanics to the global technological landscape, we’ve put together a few of our favorite inventions by Hispanics tech wizards.
The color television
Ever wondered how color first appeared on television screens? Well, the answer involves the "Chromoscopic Adapter" for television devices, created by the Mexican engineer Guillermo González Camarena in 1940. This simple, ingenious adaptor allowed for the transmission and reception of color images, and it was compatible with any of the black and white television sets of the time. In 1963, Camarena saw his invention succeed with the first color television broadcast. And in 1979, NASA used the mechanism to transmit images from Jupiter!
The neonatal artificial bubble
Peruvian engineer Claudio Castillón Lévano created a portable respirator and incubator for premature babies, a technological development that has made it much easier for premature babies to survive. Lévano’s design, called the Incuven, was a major improvement on the incubators that had been in use since the 1880s; they had the capacity to regulate temperature and vastly reduced the risk of contamination. Incuven’s patent was published by the United States in 2004, after more than 20 years of research and work by Lévano and his associates.
The laryngoscope
If you’ve ever taken a voice lesson or had a bad cough that wouldn’t go away, you may have undergone a laryngoscopy – and you have Spanish singer & voice teacher Manuel García to thank for inventing the tech that makes a laryngoscopy possible! In 1854, García’s invention used mirrors and external light to make it possible for doctors to view a functioning human voice box in action.
CAPTCHA codes
You know when you’re making a purchase or entering a website, and that website gives you some crazy jumbled letters to transcribe? Those crazy letter and number codes are called CAPTCHA, and they are essentially a way to check if the person trying to register is a live human being as opposed to a computer program attempting to spam the site. CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” and was invented in 2000 in part by Guatemalan computer science professor Luis Von Ahn. Von Ahn is also the CEO and co-founder of Duolingo!
Want to learn more about the many Hispanics who have advanced technology across the globe? Check out the official website of Hispanic Heritage Month!