Strictly speaking, Ernest Lawrence, who invented the cyclotron, "invented" the
Trinitron. He developed a color TV display tube, called the Chromatron.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chromatron

Instead of a conventional shadow mask, it used an array of vertical wires. A
high voltage applied to these "wiggled" the electron beam to alternately
strike the red, green, and blue stripes in each trio. It should be obvious
that the switching rate for a large tube would be so high as to make the
device impractical.

Sony took over development, and was unable to make the Chromatron work in any
practical way. I suspect someone at Sony had the bright idea of making the
wires in the array wide enough that it acted as a shadow mask. Viola! -- the
Trinitron.