Charles Francis Jenkins - Television

Television

Jenkins moved on to work on television. He published an article on "Motion Pictures by Wireless" in 1913, but it was not until 1923 that he transmitted moving silhouette images for witnesses, and it was June 13, 1925 that he publicly demonstrated synchronized transmission of pictures and sound. He was granted the U.S. patent No. 1,544,156 (Transmitting Pictures over Wireless) on June 30, 1925 (filed on March 13, 1922).

His mechanical technologies (also pioneered by John Logie Baird) were later overtaken by electronic television such as devised by Vladimir Zworykin and Philo Farnsworth.

In 1928, the Jenkins Television Corporation opened the first television broadcasting station in the U.S., named W3XK, which went on air on July 2 and first sent from the Jenkins Labs in Washington and from 1929 on from Wheaton, Maryland on five nights a week. At first, the station could only send silhouette images due to its narrow bandwidth, but that was soon rectified and real black-and-white images were transmitted.

In March 1932, Jenkins Television Corporation was liquidated, and its assets were acquired by Lee DeForest Radio Corporation. Within months, the DeForest company went bankrupt, and the assets were bought by RCA, which stopped all work on electromechanical television.

Read more about this topic:  Charles Francis Jenkins

Famous quotes containing the word television:

    The technological landscape of the present day has enfranchised its own electorates—the inhabitants of marketing zones in the consumer goods society, television audiences and news magazine readerships... vote with money at the cash counter rather than with the ballot paper at the polling booth.
    —J.G. (James Graham)

    The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?
    Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

    Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.
    Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)