Phantoscopes, Radiovision, and the Dawn of TV

In 1925, Science announced a spectacular new invention they called “Radio Movies.” The bulletin explained that inventor C. Francis Jenkins succeeded in transmitting motion pictures over distance without wires. “Describing the laboratory experiments in which this seeming marvel is daily performed,” it runs, “he predicted that stay-at-homes throughout the country will see the next presidential inaugural ceremonies and the Olympic games without leaving their own firesides.”

Despite this feat, television histories neglected Jenkins for decades, explains film historian Richard Koszarski. He argues that while Jenkins’s accomplishments in television were quickly surpassed, his vision of television’s future was prescient.

Live television had long been a holy grail for inventors. Philo Farnsworth, John Logie Baird, and others dedicated their lives to the quest, Koszarski writes, noting that “Farnsworth actually told his new bride on their wedding night that there was another woman in his life—television.”

Jenkins, meanwhile, had built a career around photography and film. He invented the Phantoscope in 1895, a projector to display moving pictures one frame at a time. The goal was to achieve between twelve and sixteen frames per second, creating a sense of persistent motion. Even in this domain, Koszarski explains, film legends like French inventors Augustus and Louis Lumière often overshadow Jenkins.

In the early twentieth century, Jenkins achieved early success in transmitting motion pictures wirelessly. He started with a machine that used prismatic discs to transmit single images. Science compares it to a pencil-rubbing, where a “point of light is made to travel across a photographic plate in a succession of parallel adjacent lines,” the intensity of the light being “controlled by the varying strength of the incoming radio signals.”

These “photographs-by-radio,” as Jenkins called them, could be put into motion simply through speeding up transmission. He envisioned “radio-movies” accompanying live news programs and governments overseeing battles through images captured by overhead planes. Then, in 1923, Koszarski writes, Jenkins achieved the “first witnessed demonstration of moving images transmitted by wireless,” showing Jenkins himself waving to the viewer. He called it “Radiovision.”

Jenkins published articles in The Science News-Letter starting in 1928, giving readers instructions for constructing their own “radiovisor,” a sort of television receiver. By the next year, James Stokely of the The Science News-Letter reported that “a half-dozen or so stations are now putting on regular programs” in radiovision, received by amateurs with radiovisors across the country. It was crude, Stokley admitted, but it worked, and a speculative illustration shows a couple watching Herbert Hoover’s inauguration.

Other technologies made these devices obsolete, Koszarski explains, and the Jenkins Television Corporation was a commercial failure. But Koszarski believes that time vindicated Jenkins’s conviction that prerecorded programs were more practical than live programs. While live TV seemed victorious when people were writing the first television histories, by the end of the twentieth century recorded programming became dominant. Taking into account the full story, Koszarski argues, “Jenkins re-emerges as the only figure clearly positioned at the intersection of film, photography, and television.”

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