Everything about Charles Francis Jenkins totally explained
» Not to be confused with Charles Francis Jenkins (1865-1951), a U.S. publisher.
Charles Francis Jenkins (
August 22,
1867 –
June 6,
1934) was an
American pioneer of
early cinema and one of the inventors of
television, though he used mechanical rather than electronic technologies. His businesses included
Charles Jenkins Laboratories and Jenkins Television Corporation (the corporation being founded in
1928, the year the Laboratories were granted the first commercial television license in the
United States).
Jenkins was born in
Dayton, Ohio, grew up near
Richmond, Indiana, where he went to school, and went to
Washington, D.C. in
1890, where he worked as a
stenographer. He started experimenting with movie
film in
1891, and eventually quit his job and concentrated fully on the development of his own
movie projector, the Phantascope.
At the Bliss School of Electricity, in Washington, D.C., he met his classmate
Thomas Armat, and together they improved the design. They did a public screening at the
Cotton States and International Exposition in
Atlanta in
1895 and subsequently broke up quarreling over
patent issues. Armat eventually won the case in which Jenkins had tried to claim sole ownership of the patent, and Jenkins sold out to him. Armat subsequently joined
Thomas Edison, to whom he sold the rights to market the projector under the name Vitascope.
Jenkins moved on to work on television. He published an article on "Motion Pictures by Wireless" in
1913, but it wasn't until
1923 that he transmitted moving silhouette images for witnesses, and it was
June 13 1925 that he publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of pictures and sound. He was granted the U.S. patent No. 1,544,156 (
Transmitting Pictures over Wireless) on
June 30,
1925 (filed on
March 13 1922).
His mechanical technologies (also pioneered by
John Logie Baird) were later overtaken by electronic television such as devised by
Vladimir Zworykin and
Philo Farnsworth.
In
1928, the
Jenkins Television Corporation opened the first television broadcasting station in the
U.S., named
W3XK, which went on air on
July 2 and first sent from the Jenkins Labs in Washington and from
1929 on from
Wheaton, Maryland on five nights a week. At first, the station could only send silhouette images due to its narrow
bandwidth, but that was soon rectified and real black-and-white images were transmitted.
In
March 1932, Jenkins Television Corporation was liquidated, and its assets were acquired by
Lee DeForest Radio Corporation. Within months, the DeForest company went bankrupt, and the assets were bought by
RCA, which stopped all work on electromechanical television.
Charles Francis Jenkins died at age 66 in Washington, D.C. He is interred in
Rock Creek Cemetery.
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