by C. Francis Jenkins 1929
This is a small extract from an early text on television from the 1920s, written by C. Francis Jenkins. Jenkins was instrumental in the birth of motion pictures in the 1890s. As an inventor, he built and patented one of the earliest prototypes of the motion picture projector which, by the time this book was published, was delivering entertainment in movie theaters throughout the world. He claimed to produce the first photographs by radio and mechanisms for viewing radiomovies for entertainment in the home. By 1929, he held more than four hundred patents, foreign and domestic, and maintained a private R&D laboratory in Washington, D.C. He was also the founder of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers or SMPE, the precursor to SMPTE.
