Charles Francis Jenkins (August 22, 1867 - June 5, 1934) was a 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 Exhibition in Atlanta in 1896 and subsequently broke up quarrelling 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 was not 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 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 1931 Jenkins Television Corporation was acquired by Lee DeForest.
He is today one of the more obscure pioneers of television, but in his day his contribution was of great importance. In his lifetime, he acquired over 400 patents.
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Another Charles Francis Jenkins (December 17, 1865 - July 2, 1951) was a U.S. publisher.
Last updated: 09-03-2005 18:37:12
