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How C. Francis Jenkins Fought to Keep Thomas Edison from Claiming Credit for One of Jenkins’ Most Significant Inventions

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How C. Francis Jenkins Fought to Keep Thomas Edison from Claiming Credit for One of Jenkins’ Most Significant Inventions ABSTRACT THE QUAKER FARM BOY AND THE WIZARD OF MENLO PARK: HOW C. FRANCIS JENKINS FOUGHT TO KEEP THOMAS EDISON FROM CLAIMING CREDIT FOR ONE OF JENKINS’ MOST SIGNIFICANT INVENTIONS by Cheryl Jeanne Gibbs For decades, C. Francis Jenkins fought efforts to discredit his role in inventing the first successful motion picture projector. Thomas Armat, his partner in creating the projector, licensed it to Thomas Edison without Jenkins’ permission and agreed to let Edison market the projector as his own. Armat then sued over rights to the two men’s joint patent. Although each man claimed to be the true inventor, the joint patent was upheld. But Jenkins falsified evidence to prove his case and, in disgrace, sold Armat the rights to the multi-million-dollar joint patent for a few thousand dollars. Jenkins then sought recognition for the invention from scientific institutions. Every time he succeeded, Armat and Edison fought to erase Jenkins’ name from the historical record. They filed suit and sent angry letters to organizations that honored Jenkins. Although Jenkins documented his work on the projector in books and scrapbooks, by 1947 Armat had written Jenkins out of the story of how the projector came to be. When scholars in the late 1970s and 1980s debunked the myths surrounding Edison and credited Jenkins and Armat with the first successful commercial screening of a motion picture, Jenkins got his due. THE QUAKER FARM BOY AND THE WIZARD OF MENLO PARK: HOW C. FRANCIS JENKINS FOUGHT TO KEEP THOMAS EDISON FROM CLAIMING CREDIT FOR JENKINS’ MOST SIGNIFICANT INVENTION Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in History by Cheryl Jeanne Gibbs Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2018 Advisor: Allan Winkler Reader: James Tobin Reader: Helen Sheumaker ©2018 Cheryl Jeanne Gibbs This thesis titled THE QUAKER FARM BOY AND THE WIZARD OF MENLO PARK: HOW C. FRANCIS JENKINS FOUGHT TO KEEP THOMAS EDISON FROM CLAIMING CREDIT FOR JENKINS’ MOST SIGNIFICANT INVENTION by Cheryl Jeanne Gibbs has been approved for publication by The College of Arts and Science and Department of History ____________________________________________________ Allan Winkler ______________________________________________________ James Tobin _______________________________________________________ Helen Sheumaker Table of Contents Dedication ................................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................. iii Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1 Jenkins’ Early Life .................................................................................................................. 4 Jenkins Goes West ................................................................................................................... 7 Jenkins’ Path to Full-Time Inventing .................................................................................... 8 Working in Edison’s Shadow ............................................................................................... 12 Jenkins and His Quaker Roots ............................................................................................. 18 Jenkins and The Motion Picture Projector ......................................................................... 26 Armat Protests Jenkins’ Medal ............................................................................................ 34 Edison Tries Again to Create a Monopoly .......................................................................... 38 Jenkins’ Accolades Trigger Another Armat Attack .......................................................... 41 Jenkins’ Accomplishment Recognized ................................................................................ 45 Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 48 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................... 52 iii Dedication To my husband, Michael L. White; my parents, Aubrey Jeanne Smith Gibbs and the late Wallace W. Gibbs; my beloved sister Catherine Gibbs; my dear friend Marya Bower, whose voice is always in my head; my esteemed colleague, friend and thesis committee member James Tobin; my gifted professor and thesis committee member Helen Sheumaker; my longtime chair, mentor and friend, Richard Campbell; and my impossibly generous yet demanding professor and thesis advisor Allan Winkler. It takes a village to raise a historian, and you are my village. iv Acknowledgements Imagine my surprise when, at the age of 53, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in history for no good reason. By that time, I had worked as a full-time journalist for a dozen years. I had taught journalism as an adjunct at Indiana University East while simultaneously working as a newspaper editor and doing work toward my master’s degree in journalism at Ball State University. I had marveled at the immense body of media scholarship I discovered while working toward my master’s degree, but I did not feel especially called to contribute much to it. I had then left my last full-time journalism job to finish my master’s as I began teaching at Earlham College. Also while at Earlham, through the good graces of journalists Ed Arnone and Lisa Austin, I had the good fortune to find my way into working with the Project on Public Life and the Press. In that project, New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen brought working journalists into conversation with scholars who drew on their research and wisdom to challenge the day-to-day routines and rationales of journalistic practice. I enjoyed the intellectual stimulation of interacting with people like Jay and other scholars like James Carey, Ed Lambeth, Richard Campbell, Phil Meyer, Sharon Iorio, Kathy Campbell, Mary Beth Callie and Ana Maria Miralles, as well as innovative journalists like Lisa, Ed, Tom Warhover (with whom I later co- authored a beginning reporting textbook), Cole Campbell, Jan Schaffer, Buzz Merritt, Hernando Rojas, Martha Lucia Moreno, and I considered doing doctoral work at that point, but it just did not make sense to leave my teaching job to spend years away from my family earning a Ph.D. at great expense just to become better-qualified for the job I already had. Fast-forward to 2008, when as a relatively new member of the faculty at Miami University I sat in on a research presentation by job candidate and future colleague Kathleen Ryan, about her research on the media’s representation of women in the military during World War II. I was transfixed, partly because I found her work fascinating, but also because it immediately ignited a spark in me that soon developed into a full-blown flame of interest in doing similar research — with a historical bent. As a reporter, I always loved learning stories about local history — about historic buildings or famous people or pivotal events — but this was something different, a deeper, multifaceted understanding of the historical context in which those women’s lives had unfolded. That same year, I worked with students on a reporting project with my local newspaper, The Palladium-Item, in Richmond, Ind., about the 40th anniversary of an explosion that had killed 41 people in Richmond. We dutifully reviewed past coverage of that event and went back to many of the same sources, if they were still alive, for new quotes. But we also discovered a source in suburban Indianapolis who had never been interviewed — a close relative of the couple whose gun store was Ground Zero in that explosion. His family’s side of the story had never been told. After he reluctantly agreed to speak to us, he said the pain of that event had irreparably harmed his family. Most of them had moved away, and he still felt raw when talking about it. At the time of the explosion, investigators had determined that the blast was caused by some kind of spark igniting a leaky natural gas line leading into the gun store, where gun powder was stored in bulk in the basement. His family — including the gun store owners’ two school-aged daughters who were orphaned in the tragedy — never came to terms with what had happened or with the cruel comments people made to and about them. His comments made it clear that complex news stories often have aspects that cannot be known until a certain amount of time has passed. During that reporting project, my affection for history matured into a personal quest for a deeper, broader understanding of the recent past that led me to pursue doctoral work in history. v I remain grateful to Carla Gardina Pestana for encouraging me to apply, and to the faculty of the History Department at the time for accepting me as their last doctoral student (the doctoral program was shut down the following year). To a person, each of my professors in Miami’s History Department taught me things that I found fascinating and exciting. My first history professor, Daniel Cobb, introduced me to the concept of historiography and emphasized the need to develop careful record-keeping habits while doing historical research. Wietse de Boer introduced me to the tensions between historical practice and theory. Mary Frederickson made me aware
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