Number 1519 Connecticut Avenue lies just north of Dupont Circle, just over a 20-minute walk from the White House in Washington, DC. In 1921, the inventor Charles Francis Jenkins set up his laboratory and offices there, upstairs from a car dealership.
Today there are no obvious external indications of this famous resident, nor of his exceptional achievements, awards and numerous patents. A hundred years ago at his laboratory, on 13 June 1925, Jenkins gave a demonstration of a televised film sent by radio waves from a building 10km away at what is now the US Naval Research Laboratory in Bellevue, DC.
Top image: Television pioneer Charles Francis Jenkins inspecting his broadcasting apparatus in 1928. Everett Collection Historical
The invited group of mostly government officials included the secretary of the navy, Curtis D Wilbur. They watched with fascination a film that showed a silhouette of a toy windmill with its blades in motion. The television picture comprised 48 lines, refreshed at the silent-movie rate of 16 per second.
The Washington newspaper headlines the following day hailed the demonstration as the “first motion pictures transmitted by radio”. Hobbyist magazines reported fervently that “television is here!”, calling Jenkins the “father of television”.
Today those announcements seem over-enthusiastic. Television as an operational service still had a long way to go to have the quality and range to make consumer devices feasible. All the same, they were right in anticipating where Jenkins’ demonstration might lead.
By that July, Jenkins had demonstrated vision and sound transmitted together on a single shortwave radio frequency. The published technical details indicate a high degree of sophistication in his designs, as might be expected from someone with a background in precision phototelegraphy (transmitting images over wires).
Parallel development
Jenkins had an impressive track record as an inventor. He and his business partner, Thomas Armat, are generally accepted as the originators of the intermittent drive system for motion picture film projectors in the early 1910s. This made it possible to move films one frame at a time through a projector, enabling smooth playback without any flickering.
For this landmark work, Jenkins won the prestigious Elliott Cresson Medal from the Franklin Institute and became the founder and first president of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in 1916.
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In the early 1920s he then developed a practical means of sending images of weather charts by radio to ships at sea. It was this phototelegraphy work that led him into experiments in televising silhouettes of live and filmed scenes.He claimed that he first demonstrated the technology to witnesses in June 1923.
Nevertheless, the Scottish inventor John Logie Baird beat him to become the first to do a public demonstration, in London over three weeks in March and April 1925. Baird, who had been working on the technology since early 1923, showed live moving images in reflected light transmitted by radio to enthusiastic crowds in Selfridges department store. With only eight lines per picture, he carefully chose simple objects that would be easily identifiable.
In the US, Jenkins had doubled down on improving the image quality for his demonstration. His persistence with back-lit silhouettes today seems odd considering most TV programmes would come to be televised in reflected light. Baird’s preference for showing recognisable facial features in reflected light gained him widespread recognition for his demonstration of 30-line television in January 1926.
Jenkins nevertheless launched his silent silhouette video service for hobbyists on the radio station W3XK in July 1928, around the same time as similar offerings from companies that included General Electric and the Radio Corporation of America (RCA). By the end of that year, there were thought to have been as many as 15 television stations operating in the US.
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Like Baird and Jenkins’ methods, many of these early stations relied on mechanically rotating disks with patterns of holes to scan images line by line. They were all very low on detail but were still heralded as proof of concept for television. A key factor in their acceptance was the uncanny ability of human vision to recognise facial expressions along with natural body motion in poor quality images.
Later in 1928, Baird went on to demonstrate colour, early 3D (stereoscopic) and transatlantic television all for the first time, though more as a way of attracting financial backing than presenting prototypes of future offerings. Unlike Jenkins, who earned money from his earlier inventions and patents, Baird relied largely on funding from investors to grow his business, which aimed to develop and commercialise his mechanical television technology.
What came next
Mechanical television was short-lived. Around 1931, RCA and EMI (Electric and Musical Industries), soon to become the key players in broadcasting infrastructure in the US and UK, had independently predicted insufficient public interest in this technology. With its inherently limited image quality, they thought it couldn’t support a viable business.
Swift advances in electronics continued unabated throughout the interwar years. This allowed successful development of alternative, superior television systems using ideas from scientists such as Boris Rosing in Russia and Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton in the UK.
RCA and EMI focused their respective resources on developing vastly superior electronic television systems. These scanned and reproduced images using electron beams that are fired inside a glass unit known as a cathode ray tube to capture and show the transmitted moving picture on the screens of people’s TV sets. Those pictures had around 100 times the information content of the earlier mechanical equivalents.
This made the many early mechanical television services attain one more “first”: becoming obsolete. In just over 15 years from Jenkins’ 1925 demonstration, first the UK and then the US would launch new operational broadcast television services for the public that completely overshadowed the earlier pioneering work.
Jenkins did not live to see those new systems. His health deteriorated from late 1930 and he died in 1934 aged 66, leaving behind a superb legacy of a full career in inventions.
Baird continued to work as a TV pioneer in the 1930s and 1940s, dedicated to exploring colour television and cinema projection. He died in 1946 at the age of just 57.
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Jenkins’ and Baird’s original pioneering efforts, and the excitement they generated, are still rightly heralded by many people today. We can now only imagine how it must have felt to see moving images transmitted from miles away for the first time. It’s incredible to reflect that what was once considered magic so quickly became mundane.
- The author, Donald McLean, is honorary lecturer in early television, University of Glasgow
- This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence