C. Francis Jenkins: Pioneer of Film and Television by Donald G. Godfrey (review)

C. Francis Jenkins (1867–1934) was an extraordinarily prolific inventor who lived through the end of the mechanical age and the beginning of the electronic age. The Jenkins Automobile Corporation, one of several hundred short-lived steam car manufacturers at the turn of the twentieth century, lured this reviewer to Jenkins’s biography. Between 1898 and early 1902, Jenkins produced a steam-powered truck and automobile, and an Observation Automobile Coach to take tourists around Washington, D.C. His dabbling in transportation was a minor part of Jenkins’s inventions and companies, but it typifies his career. It occurred while he was envisioning the modern movie theater.

In 1891, Jenkins began working on a screen projection system when Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope was showing tiny images to a single person in arcades. Four years later, Jenkins’s Phantoscope projected full-sized moving pictures on a jewelry store wall in his hometown of Richmond, Indiana. He spent decades fighting with financier/inventor Thomas Armat, but the latter’s inventions led to large rooms in which patrons watched wall-sized motion pictures.

While Jenkins’s 286 patents were primarily connected with film and television, many were for novelty items such as a Christmas tree holder and a pocket calculator. His love of flying led seamlessly to aviation patents. Although focused on theater and television, Jenkins followed whenever an idea occurred to him. His invention of the wax-coated paper milk carton and its manufacturing machinery produced the cash that helped support his work in television.

Jenkins understood the need for standards, and in 1916 called an engineers’ meeting from which sprang the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (SMPE). He continually promoted his ideas and inventions by publishing and lecturing widely, and was adept at using the government to promote his inventions and standards. The SMPE acted in part due to the threat of government-imposed standards.

As early as 1894, Jenkins published a method of electrically transmitting pictures, and in 1913 foresaw theatrical events electrically broadcast live into people’s homes, rather than shown with film. By 1920, Jenkins described his RadioVision, a series of prismatic rings that activated a photoelectric cell whose electric currents were then transmitted and decoded by prismatic rings, as radio for the human eye. In 1922 he successfully transmitted photographs and secured military support, and a year later was transmitting photographs under the auspices of the North American Newspaper Alliance. From point-to-point photograph transmission, Jenkins understood the potential of transmitting motion pictures.

By 1928 the Jenkins Television Corporation (JTC) attracted capitalists to compete with RCA, AT&T, and others who saw television’s future. Despite operating several experimental television stations, the JTC collapsed, a victim of lawsuits, the Depression, poor financial decisions, and Jenkins’s declining health. In 1933, David Sarnoff’s RCA purchased the remains of JTC and Jenkins’s mechanical television ideas gave way to the electronic.

The author purposes to rescue Jenkins from obscurity and see him recognized with the great television pioneers. Contemporary popular and scientific journals lauded Jenkins as a major inventor, but following his death in 1934, he was soon forgotten. Specific Jenkins patents are still cited today, lending credulity to the author’s effort. A thirteen-page bibliography and 1,046 footnotes testify to the astonishing depth of research, but this wonderful detail overwhelms what should have been a straightforward narrative. Better organization would have eliminated repetition. Technical elements deserved more clarity and additional illustrations.

The author occasionally strays from historian to advocate. Throughout the book, he seems unable to decide issues. Was Jenkins financially astute or not? Was he or Armat in the right concerning their Phantoscope patent controversy? Did Jenkins really understand the electronic side of television or was he still enamored of his mechanical technology?

Theater and television historians will enjoy this book, but it is no popular history. This is not light reading. Its immensity of information and citations make it not...