C. Francis Jenkins, Pioneer of Film and Television

Chapter 9. Television: Seeing by Electricity

9 Television: seeing by electricity The word television first appeared in France in 1907. It simply meant “vision,” bridging large distances. In Jenkins’ writings, it does not appear until around 1925.1 The word and the work evolved over time, with inventors borrowing from Industrial Age telegraphy and the telephone. The prefix tele or tel means “at a distance,” hence tele-vision was “seeing over a distance,” or bridging those distances.2 Applications of the term unfolded with each new apparatus, application, and inventor. The name was often both descriptive and a market-branding tag. By the mid-1920s, Jenkins’ definition was focused primarily on “wireless motion pictures in the home”—although technologically, in his earliest definition, television was the electrical “transmission of living imagesbywire.”HisRadioVision, withthecentercapitalletter,referredtowireless transmission of still images or facsimiles. Radiovision with the small “v” and Radio Vision as separate words were his terms for the wireless broadcast “transmission of [moving] images by radio from living subjects,” whether the images be from film or live action. Radio movies were the “broadcast records on film of these persons and scenes.”3 In 1927, Jenkins concluded that it was necessaryto“coinanewwordhere. . .wespeakof‘television’assighttransmitted over wires, and of radiovision when the transmitting medium is the air.”4 But his usage of these terms was constantly intermixed and confusing, forcing the reader to establish context for each application. Nevertheless, these terms linked inventors, technology, commodities, and corporations. They began as broadly descriptive promotion and marketing tools as the inventors worked on technological solutions, providing the foundations for what has evolved into “television” as we know it. LC 122 . chapter 9 Positioning Jenkins’ Television inventions Historians portray Jenkins as the American inventor of mechanical television . They too often portray him as something of a failure because by the early 1930s, his ideas were purchased by competitive corporate powers and then overtaken with the far-better Farnsworth and Zworykin electronic scanning techniques. Thus, Jenkins’ overriding contributions in television faded from the mainstream. The mechanical-only portrayals, however, are oversimplifications that tell only a small part of the Jenkins story, ignoring his fundamental contributions in television. In fact, mechanics and electronics remain critical components of modern systems. Jenkins’ experimental television had deep roots in mechanics, which came from the Industrial Age. The technology’s evolution waned through the years of World War I and resurfaced during the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties , when Jenkins began his experimentation using the Nipkow disks, before moving on to optical experiments. The stock-market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression cleared many inventors and smaller corporate players from the marketplace. They were simply economically overpowered and unable to compete. Their progress was buried, thwarted by the larger corporations— Westinghouse, General Electric, AT&T, and particularly RCA. The three television inventors who were the most influential during Jenkins’ lifetime were Valdmir Kosma Zworykin, John Logie Baird, and Philo Taylor Farnsworth. In 1923, thirty-five-year-old Zworykin, a recent immigrant from Russia with a doctorate in engineering science, was working with Westinghouse , where meeting the growing demand for radio receivers was the goal. Zworykin filed his first electronic scanning television patent on December 29, 1923. He was dissuaded from spending too much of his time with television by his employer, however, and he made little attempt to test and place the patent into practice.5 He did scant work with television until 1929, when it had already evolved to include motion pictures. He was hired by RCA to spearhead David Sarnoff’s technological drive, launching television’s reality.6 A British inventor, thirty-five-year-old John Logie Baird, “had just started on what was to be a lifelong task.” After recuperating from illness and several speculative business failures, Baird produced the first public television exhibition in April 1925. His demonstration was for a birthday celebration of the Selfridge department store. Baird was really not concerned about being first, or even about the publicity; “it was the case that he could not refuse the weekly cheque without which it would have been difficult for him to have carried on.”7 teleVision: seeing By electricity · 123 At this same time, seventeen-year-old Farnsworth had just drawn a schematic for an electronic television scanning system on the blackboard for his high-school teacher. It would be another four years before he would file for his patents and produce electronic scanning lines, which would later head the industry...