author
C. Francis (Charles Francis) Jenkins
1867–1934
A restless American inventor who helped push both movies and television out of the realm of experiment and into public demonstration. Best known for the Phantoscope projector and his work on mechanical television, he spent his life turning bold ideas into working devices.
1 Audiobook
Vision by radio, radio photographs, radio photograms
by C. Francis (Charles Francis) Jenkins
About the author
Born on August 22, 1867, Charles Francis Jenkins was an American engineer and prolific inventor whose work touched some of the most important new media of his era. He grew up in Ohio, spent much of his boyhood near Richmond, Indiana, attended Earlham College, and went on to build a career around practical experimentation.
Jenkins became an early motion-picture pioneer through his development of the Phantoscope, a projector he demonstrated in the 1890s. He later turned to television and became one of the leading American advocates of mechanical television, founding Jenkins Television Corporation and pursuing systems for transmitting moving images before electronic television took over.
He was also a remarkably wide-ranging inventor, credited with hundreds of patents across film, transportation, and communications. Jenkins died in Washington, D.C., on June 6, 1934, but his career remains a vivid example of the independent inventor at work during the early age of modern media.