Charles Francis Jenkins - Motion Pictures

Motion Pictures

He started experimenting with movie film in 1891, and eventually quit his job and concentrated fully on the development of his own movie projector, the Phantoscope.

As the Richmond Telegram reported, on June 6, 1894, Jenkins visited Richmond to show his parents, friends and newsmen a gadget he had been working on for two years: a "motion picture projecting box". They gathered at Jenkins' cousin's jewelry store in downtown Richmond and viewed the first film projected in front of an audience. The motion picture was of a vaudeville dancer doing a butterfly dance, which Jenkins had filmed himself in the backyard of his Washington boarding house. Not only was this the first showing of a reeled film with electric light before an audience, but it was also the first motion picture with color. Each frame was painstakingly colored by hand.

At the Bliss School of Electricity, in Washington, D.C., he met his classmate Thomas Armat, and together they improved the design. They did a public screening at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895 and subsequently broke up quarreling over patent issues. This modified Phantoscope of Jenkins and Armat was patented July 20, 1897. Jenkins eventually sold his interest in the projector to Armat. Armat subsequently joined Thomas Edison, to whom he sold the rights to market the projector under the name Vitascope.

Jenkins married Grace Love, the daughter and descendant of an old established Maryland family, in 1902. Ms. Love was the sister-in-law of the prominent Washington, D.C. developer, L.E. Breuninger.