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1 Jenkins’ Heritage and youth An Age of Things Mechanical Today’s world is predicated on the inventive ingenuity of those who preceded us. Imagine life without the movies, television, telephone, airplanes, or automobiles. The twentieth century added those things and more into our lives. The inventors of past centuries, including Charles Francis Jenkins, made these things possible. They worked as independents and often clashed with established industry giants, as Jenkins did. It was challenging for lone inventors to make a living, fund their work, and promote acceptance of a new device, and Jenkins had to meet each of these challenges. He was brilliant , gifted, mechanically inclined, and intuitive. His life spanned six decades of American history, seeing the birth of photography, radio, television, the automobile, and the airplane. He was an amateur photographer who loved to travel, a personality in demand, and a pilot. His mechanical television devices are gone, but his concepts in film projection, using intermittent motion, and his theories related to optical signals in television remain a viable force. Jenkins lived in an age of things mechanical. He was a product of the Industrial Revolution motivated by the famous Rev. Russell Conwell’s sermon “Acres of Diamonds,” which reflected the American Dream: “rags to riches . . . onward and upward.”1 Conwell set this national opportunistic tone, preaching this sermon more than six thousand times across the nation.2 His ancestors had left Europe, settled in rural America, and later moved into cities in search of better lives. Collectively, these immigrants were the labor force of the Industrial Era. In the case of Jenkins individually, Conwell was a resourceful reserve of ideas. LC 4 . chapter 1 Jenkins lived from the Industrial and Gilded Ages through World War I, the Roaring Twenties, and the Great Depression. The 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic killed an estimated fifty million people—more than the war itself. It was the deadliest human disaster in history. Schools, businesses, and homes were closed and quarantined.3 Jenkins’ work contributed to stalling the spread of the disease by providing a new sanitary milk bottle, which, according to family lore, brought him more profits than any other invention. To Jenkins, however, all of this was a means of supporting his primary endeavors in film and later television. By the 1920s, the United States had become a global economic , industrial, and military power. Financial investments once reserved for the war effort were now back in the marketplace.4 As a result, inventors prospered. No one anticipated the stock market crash on October 29, 1929. The market had always corrected itself, and in the 1920s investment returns had been exceptional. The crash ended all of that. It devastated the American population. Corporations crumbled, including the Jenkins Television Corporation and the Jenkins Laboratories. So, what did Jenkins contribute during these contrasting ages? Why should he be remembered today? He should be remembered as an inventor and a man of eminent forward-thinking ideas. In his own time, he ranked among the “Remakers of Civilization.”5 He was described as “one of a trio of the nation ’s foremost inventors”6 and “one of the ten greatest figures in Motion Pictures .”7 In radio, he was placed among the top one hundred men of science.8 Scientific American described him as having “the mind of the practical, working inventor . . . dedicated to his profession like any banker, lawyer, medical doctor or journalist [who] would become the man who [kept] America in the front ranks in the development of radio vision or ‘seeing’ by radio.”9 He was known as “one of radio’s most colorful personages,” a pioneer of “seeing via the ether.”10 The Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Arthur C. Hardy credited our ability to see movies in our homes as “due largely to the efforts of C. Francis Jenkins.”11 His primary inventions were in motion picture and television, but he held hundreds of patents for an amazingly wide variety of inventions. He spearheaded motion-picture and television work with mechanical systems, and then, when electronic television replaced mechanical systems, he moved into optical-electronic systems. Inventing was his natural talent (see appendix A for a list of Jenkins’ patents).12 The story of C. Francis Jenkins would have been different without the Great Depression , or if he had lived longer. Yet, even in a world permeated by inventive contrasts, worldwide epidemics, the Great War, and economic roller coasters , L. C. Porters depicted Jenkins as “a man of great vision...

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