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

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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

Cheryl Jeanne Gibbs

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2018

Advisor: Allan Winkler

Reader: James Tobin

Reader: Helen Sheumaker

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

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.

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.

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 of the role that class has played throughout American history. Helen Sheumaker taught me much about public history and about the way that celebrity arose in American culture. Elena Jackson Albarrán did a brilliant job of complicating my understanding of the culture of a country and a continent that are particularly close to my heart due to my travels there: Mexico and South America. And Allan Winkler helped me not only become a better writer but also to make the transformation from being a mere reporter of recent events to being an interpreter of history, to the degree that I have succeeded in doing that. He, Elena Albarrán and Mary Cayton especially pushed me past my own discomfort to develop my own voice as a historian.

I also remain grateful to Mary Cayton for suggesting that I consider earning a master’s degree after some personal events took precedence over my completion of the Ph.D. My now-92-year- old mother needed to transition from her apartment in Florida into a setting closer to me. Mary pointed out that I had already completed the course work for the master’s so would just need to complete the thesis, for which I already had done sufficient research. The move was difficult for my mom, but she is now in a place where she can receive the support she needs to carry out her plan of living well into her second century, playing bridge and using the nearest staircase as her exercise regimen several times a day. I am thankful to Miami’s Graduate School and the History Department for extending my deadline so I could finish this thesis, and to the History Department’s Director of Graduate Studies, Daniel Prior, for helping me to navigate the procedures necessary for me to dive back into completing my degree — including confirming that my older course work was not outdated. I also am grateful to the History Department’s administrative assistant, Jeri Schaner, who was cheerfully, efficiently helpful more times than I can recall.

I am grateful to Richard Campbell, longtime director of Miami’s Journalism Program and, later, chair of the Department of Media, Journalism and Film, for the many ways he has challenged and supported me as I have walked this path. He has mentored me, offered honest feedback — sometimes painfully so — on some of my papers, and never gave up on me when I was thinking I would not be able to finish. My colleague, James Tobin, who earned a Ph.D. in history but teaches with me in Miami’s Journalism Program, also has served as a mentor as well as a role model. His books about the Wright Brothers’ work on the airplane and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s evolution from his early days in politics through his presidency made me want to write just like him (although I doubt I will ever succeed).

C. Francis Jenkins’ great-great-nephew Philip Jenkins, grandson of Jenkins’ brother Atwood, and Jenkins’ great-great-great-nephew, David Sproul, generously met with me and shared their memories of Jenkins. David Sproul also showed me the location of Jenkins’ laboratory, above where we met at Kramerbooks near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. My former colleague at Earlham College, Quaker scholar Mary Garman, enthusiastically shared with me her careful, well-informed research about Jenkins’ family. Another former Earlham colleague, Tom Hamm,

vi professor of history and curator of the college’s Quaker collection, was a tremendous help in getting me to materials that mentioned Jenkins’ time there as well as his activities during his years in the western United States.

On a personal level, I am grateful to my friend Marya Bower for her undying support and understanding. When I was talking with her about switching to a master’s degree, I told her I had already achieved one important thing I wanted to get out of doing doctoral work: I believed that people who earn Ph.D.s think differently as a result, and I wanted to find out if I could learn to think that way. I told her I had discovered I wasn’t a natural scholar, but I did have that ability. It took time, and I had to dig deep, but I could do it. Her response was typical of her wisdom, warmth and humility: “Cheryl, we all have to dig deep.” She continued to provide well-timed words that helped me stay focused during the process of finishing this thesis.

I am grateful to my sister, Catherine Gibbs, for her constant support and bottomless affection; to my first teacher, my mother Aubrey Jeanne Smith Gibbs, who gave me a deeply rooted love of learning that has sustained me as I have pursued my studies in history; and to my father Wallace Williamse Gibbs, a first-generation college student who was always mindful of what a privilege it is to get a good education through the often herculean efforts of gifted teachers.

Last, but the opposite of least, I am exceedingly grateful to my husband, Mickey White, for supporting me in pretty much anything I have ever taken on, including my studies in history. He has graciously fed our menagerie of dogs and cats, fired up the Crockpot (and later, the Instant Pot) with home-cooked meals, tolerated my clutter when it has sat too long on the dining room table as I have traveled to archives or holed up in my office writing. He also has served as a sounding board when I struggled to articulate my own views about the many things I’ve written about during my time as a graduate student in history. I could not have done any of it without his help.

vii

Introduction

In 1932, aging inventor C. Francis Jenkins was sick at heart, in more ways than one. After patenting more than 400 inventions in the United States and abroad, his health had begun to fail. He also was watching his beloved Radiovision, a cumbersome, mechanical form of television he worked to perfect over a period of nearly a decade, being eclipsed by the new, cheaper, all-electronic method of transmitting moving images of better quality through what Jenkins and his contemporaries called “the ether.” The year before, his newly formed company that marketed the Radiovision brand, Jenkins Television Corp., was among the many U.S. companies hit hard by the stock market collapse on Black Friday, Oct. 29, 1929. That event precipitated the sale of both Jenkins Television and the experimental television station — the first in the nation when it opened in 1928 — that Jenkins was operating at the time of the crash. On June 30, 1931, Jenkins suffered a serious heart attack. A few months later, while taking a train to a meeting in California, he had to get off in Chicago and return home after he physically collapsed. Although he never fully recovered, he recuperated enough to continue working in his beloved lab and, as that became more challenging, his staff installed a television receiver in his home so he could oversee their work from a distance. Also during these difficult years, Jenkins renewed his interest in writing, something he had previously done by self-publishing books about the development and technical aspects of his two most remarkable inventions — Radio Vision and, 35 years earlier, the first successful motion picture projector. This time when he began to write, though, his chosen subject was not his inventions but his capacity to invent, and how he came to possess it. In the preface to the autobiography he self-published in 1931, he said his purpose in writing the book was to provide information that might be helpful in identifying budding young inventors. “Just how the natural inventor differs mentally from the only destructively inquisitive boy may not be definitely known, perhaps, but an intimate recital of the boyhood activities of an individual case, typical of his class, may be helpful in discovering this special talent,” Jenkins wrote.1 Once such talent was identified, Jenkins hoped it could be nurtured. “This must be the excuse for the following recital of the activities of a boy who later contributed to human advancement in many fields of activity,” he wrote.

1 C. Francis Jenkins, The Boyhood of an Inventor (Washington, D.C.: National Capital Press Inc., 1931), xviii-xix. 1

What became clear, however, was that Jenkins also wanted to create an indelible, highly romanticized self-portrait of himself as a spirited, independent inventor — a sort of David to Thomas Edison’s Goliath. From the very first sentence of the book, he positions himself in a diminutive way: “This boy was born in Ohio, on the Stillwater,” he writes. From that point on, he refers to himself as “the boy,” then “the young man” or “the inventor,” and, finally, “Mr. Jenkins” or, in a tongue-in-cheek way, “our hero.” Although it was not typical of autobiographies at the time for an author to refer to himself in the third person, it was not without precedent. Henry Adams did it in The Education of Henry Adams, published privately in 1906 and republished commercially — and thus, more broadly — in 1918, after Adams’ death. Adams’ book was highly regarded and was widely read by writers and intellectuals after its commercial release.2 There is no direct evidence that Jenkins read Adams’ book, but it is very possible that he did, and very likely he at least would have been aware of it. “I have always been an insatiable reader,” Jenkins wrote.3 Throughout his autobiography, Jenkins described himself with a disarming degree of humility as a poor, self-taught inventor. In truth, that description was an exaggeration. He was never poor but was a man of modest means until he became wealthy during the last years of his life, and he received more education than most in his day. He did, however, spurn the corporate backing and large laboratory model that brought great wealth to other inventors. Instead, he remained stubbornly independent throughout most of his life. Although he accepted financial backing from individuals at times, he often struggled to make ends meet, as indicated by his anecdote about a time when he delivered one of his lesser- known inventions, a machine that perforated the edges of long lengths of film, to George Eastman, of Eastman Kodak fame. Eastman invited Jenkins to have lunch with him before returning home. “Mr. Eastman probably never knew that his lunch invitation was a blessing to the breakfastless inventor. His (Jenkins’) poverty was discovered, however, when the request was made that the check in payment for the machine be cashed so that return railroad fare could be bought.”4 Jenkins was not exaggerating, though, when he claimed he had contributed to what he and his contemporaries viewed as “human advancement.” He became an inventor during a time

2 Robert F. Sayre, American Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Writing (Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), 535. 3 Jenkins, 255. 4 Ibid., 83. 2 when the ubiquitous American mythology surrounding inventors afforded them rock-star status. Inventors like Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison had illustrated the wonders that could result from harnessing the power of electricity. By the late 1800s, people became breathless with excitement each time they heard there was a new, potentially life- changing invention on the horizon. Inventors were romanticized as having minds that worked differently and had the capacity to take giant leaps forward, breaking with the past to create out of thin air things that would make life better. 5 If they were eccentric, that merely made them interesting — and human. If an inventor’s quirks caused any inconvenience or difficulty, it was a small price to pay. Inventors were, plain and simple, heroes, much like sculptors were in ancient Greece or like painters were during the Italian Renaissance.6 As an inventor, Jenkins seemed primarily motivated to make life better — a renaissance man whose inventions ranged from a sterile, disposable milk container made of spiraled, coated paper, to an automobile starter to an airplane launching gear to an airplane cabin ventilation system. Jenkins took a scattershot approach to invention, working on dozens of inventions simultaneously.7 Many of his inventions were still being referenced in patent applications in the early 2000s.8 However, in his day he was best known as a pioneer in two industries — motion pictures and television — that transformed the American psyche, expanded the global sense of possibility and fostered the celebrity culture in which Edison in particular had an uncanny ability to leverage his fame to become a household name while other inventors, including Jenkins, struggled for recognition. The fact that Jenkins never attained the degree of fame or fortune enjoyed by other inventors who were his contemporaries was due at least in part to his ambivalence about those things, which resulted from his upbringing as a Quaker. His autobiography makes clear that his family taught him to view his talent for invention as a God-given gift, for which he personally should claim no credit. Although they would have supported him in seeking to have a good reputation, questing after fame would have been considered prideful, indicating an inflated view

5 Ward, Thomas B., Ronald A. Finke and Steven M. Smith, Creativity and The Mind: Discovering the Genius Within. Perseus Publishing (2002). 6 Wyn Wachhorst, Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 108. 7 Gene G. Kelkres, “A Forgotten First: The Armat-Jenkins Partnership and the Atlanta Projection,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Winter 1984), 47. 8 Donald G. Godfrey, C. Francis Jenkins: Pioneer of Film and Television (Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 193-4. 3 of his own importance. Jenkins’ family also viewed money as something that should be earned through honest labor, and any surplus shared with others less fortunate. The fact that Jenkins embraced his family’s views toward money was evidenced by his generosity toward others, especially his young nieces, nephews as well as other family members.9 Only after Jenkins arrived in the city of Washington, D.C., and encountered people with very different views on fame and fortune did he find himself, often clumsily and sometimes even fraudulently, developing more worldly ways to fight for what he saw as rightfully his. Inventors in his day could only make a living and go on inventing if they filed patents to claim their inventions as their own. They needed public recognition for their inventions so as to attract investors to fund their continuing efforts. And when others challenged their claims of being the first to create a successful invention, they had to defend themselves and their patents against those claims, which most often were made by better-funded competitors. From the time Jenkins became a full-time inventor, he found himself tangling with competitors who were better funded. Thomas Armat, Jenkins’ financial partner in the development of the first commercially viable motion picture projector called the Phantoscope, ended up making a deal with agents for none other than Thomas Edison to market the projector as one of Edison’s own inventions. Armat made that deal behind Jenkins’ back and later filed a patent interference case that resulted in Armat getting all rights to their historic joint patent, from which he earned millions.10 The Phantoscope, with Armat’s but not Jenkins’ consent, was rebranded and marketed as “Edison’s Greatest Marvel: The Vitascope,” and from that point on, Jenkins, Armat and Edison were engaged in an ugly, decades-long feud. Off and on for decades, Armat and Edison sought both separately and together to discredit Jenkins and remove his name from any and all mentions of the invention of the first successful motion picture projector. Were it not for Jenkins’ own writings, a series of books critical of Edison in the 1980s, and a cascade of scholarship triggered by a ground-breaking article in the Winter 1984 issue of the Quarterly Review of Film Studies, Armat and Edison might have succeeded in writing Jenkins out of the history of his most successful invention.11

9 L. (Lawrence) C. Porter, “C. Francis Jenkins: An Appreciation,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers XXIII, No. 3 (Sept. 1934), 126. 10 Godfrey, 48. 11 Kelkres. 4

Jenkins’ Early Life

Throughout his autobiography, Jenkins traced his gift for invention to his early years on the family farm. He described his childhood as nothing short of idyllic. “The boy's home was a happy one, and he never heard a cross word pass between father and mother,” Jenkins wrote.12 Jenkins was the oldest child of Amasa and Mary Jenkins, born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1867. Two years after his birth, the family moved to a farm near Fountain City, Indiana, where he grew up with three brothers (although his next-to-youngest brother died before his second birthday) and two sisters. The nearest city of any size, Richmond, was a small but bustling center of industry and culture. During the months when the fields lay idle, the Jenkins children walked three miles each way to the country school they attended. Trips to the city were few — and tremendously exciting. Among Richmond’s most successful companies at the time were several concerned with manufacturing farm implements, including Gaar, Scott & Co., which made steam threshers and sold them throughout the world. Among the reasons the companies flourished were Richmond’s location on both a heavily traveled railroad and on the National Road, also known as the Cumberland Road, the first major improved U.S. highway, traveling east from Cumberland, Md., through Richmond and on to St. Louis, Mo. In addition, Indiana, which did not allow slavery, was free from the destruction and disruption that resulted from the Civil War, yet close enough to war-ravaged areas to respond to the needs the war created — including the need to increase the yields of still-functioning farms to replenish the nation’s food supply while also compensating for the loss of free labor in the south after slaves there were emancipated. 13 Although many Indiana men volunteered for service in the Civil War, the members of Jenkins’ family did not. Quakers — or, more properly, members of the Religious Society of Friends — had emigrated to the United States from England in search of religious freedom. They were (and still are) committed to resolving conflicts through nonviolent means. The Quakers’ “peace testimony” is reflected in the following comment from a letter delivered by British Quaker Margaret Fell to King Charles II of England: We are a people that follow after those things that make for peace, love, and unity … and do deny and bear our testimony against all strife, and wars, and contentions that come from the lusts that war in the members,

12 Jenkins, 7. 13 Holland Thompson, The Age of Invention: A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1921), 126. 5

that war against the soul, which we wait for and watch for in all people, and love and desire the good of all. 14

American Quakers migrated to the areas now known as Ohio and Indiana after the land was opened to settlement by European-Americans through the signing of the Greenville Treaty in 1795. Many came from Pennsylvania, where well-known Quaker William Penn’s utopian “Holy Experiment” had failed during the French and Indian War (1754-1763). Quakers in Pennsylvania had peacefully coexisted with the Leni-Lenape Indians before the French began setting up forts in the area and the British government moved to stop them. Both countries then formed alliances with different Indian tribes, pitting them against one another, and both Quakers and non-Quakers were divided as to how to respond. Eventually, the state appropriated funds for a militia to serve in the war, and Quakers either withdrew from or were voted out of political power, ending the experiment. Other Quakers migrated to the area from slave states in the south, where tensions over slavery steadily increased throughout the 1800s. The southern Quakers wanted to live in states free of slavery. Whether from the south or not, many Quakers in Indiana and Ohio were part of the Underground Railroad, helping slaves to escape before and during the Civil War. Although there is no evidence that Jenkins’ family participated in the Underground Railroad, given the closeness and interconnectedness of Quaker communities in Ohio and Indiana, it is likely that his parents at least knew people who did. Although Jenkins was born two years after the end of the American Civil War, he likely would not have remembered any of the war’s devastating aftermath. Although some volunteer soldiers would have returned to Ohio and Indiana, including some who were wounded, Jenkins would have been too young and too isolated on the family farm to have encountered them or known what he was seeing if he did. As a result, he would have grown up in a setting untouched by war, being schooled in the ways of pacifism by his devout Quaker parents. His mother Mary’s ancestors were descendants of America’s best-known Quaker, William Penn. Jenkins’ father, Amasa, was a successful farmer known throughout the area for having a knack with troublesome horses. But Jenkins’ father also valued new inventions, as reflected in this quote from Jenkins’ book: “… his father was progressive and was the first in the

14 Margaret Fell, “A declaration from the harmless and innocent people of God, called Quakers,” a letter to the king of England on persecution in 1660, appended to William Shewen, The True Christian’s Faith and Experience Briefly Declared (London, 1684-5, reprinted Philadelphia: M.T.C. Gould, 1830), 136. 6 neighborhood to get the newest farm implements.”15 Because Jenkins, then called Charley (his first name was Charles), had shown an early aptitude for understanding and fixing mechanical things, it fell to him to repair that equipment. “So the boy's oversight took in a wide range of tools, for the well-equipped farm has a great variety of machines, for clearing ground, for preparing the soil for seeding, for the planting, cultivation and harvesting of crops, and the threshing and storing of grain. His ‘power factors’ were horses and steam, and his playthings riding-plows and cultivators, mowers, harvesters, self- binders, threshing machines, traction engines, farm sawmills, feed cutters, windmills, hay-riggers, etc.”16 Life as Jenkins knew it, up until the time he left home, was lived in a community where everyone was viewed as having an important role in decision-making, and their ideas and inspirations were welcomed because they were viewed as springing from their connection to the God within. Some highly respected members of the Quaker community were sometimes referred to as “weighty,” because of their reputations for being especially good at articulating and interpreting Quaker values in their congregations, called “meetings,” as well as in the world. But no one was viewed as having more power than anyone else, congregational decisions were made through consensus, and decisions were therefore viewed as common property. One of the strengths of The Society of Friends involves the interplay between individual members and the group.17 Inventions would have been viewed as collective efforts, since no invention is ever cut from whole cloth. New inventions always involve incremental improvements on past inventions, so the idea that one man could claim to have invented something like a motion picture projector would have seemed foreign to most Quakers.

Jenkins Goes West

After Jenkins graduated from high school, he attended his parents’ alma mater, Earlham College, a Quaker college in Richmond, Indiana, for one semester during the 1884-5 school year.18 When he was quoted later in newspaper articles, he attributed his short stay at Earlham to

15 Jenkins, 46. 16 Jenkins, 46. 17 Interview with Earlham College emeritus Professor of Religion and Quaker historian Mary Garman, Oct. 9, 2018. 18 Earlham College Archives, Richmond, Indiana. 7 his “red head” (of hair) and his resulting impetuousness (another recurring theme in his writing). It would be anachronistic. however, to label him a “college dropout.” At that time in history, it was quite common for young people to spend only a year or two in college, leaving for jobs or other pursuits.19 The following year, Earlham’s college magazine noted that Jenkins was enrolled in classes in Richmond and Institute of Penmanship & Short-hand.20 Having developed “an ambition to travel,”21 Jenkins decided to head for the Pacific Coast and said in his autobiography that his parents reluctantly took him to the railroad station to begin his trip. By that time in his life, Jenkins likely would have heard the exhortation, “Go west, young man, and grow up with the country,” from an 1865 editorial by American author and newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Jenkins — a voracious reader — likely would have known about Theodore Roosevelt’s adventures in the West, as chronicled in his 1885 book Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. He also may also have been aware of the resurgence of the idea of the manifest destiny prompted by Illinois-born and Ohio-raised Congregationalist missionary Josiah Strong’s 1885 bestseller, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Present Crisis, which made the case for westward expansion, converting “lesser” races to Christianity and granting equal civil rights for all who converted. Jenkins spent about three years traveling. He went first to the Pacific Northwest, studying telegraphy in Newburg, Oregon.22 He also worked in a sawmill and on the railroads, and then traveled to the Southwest. In his autobiography, he wrote that in the Sierra Nevada mines he “found plenty of work for his aptitude in mechanisms, repairing hoisting machinery, mine locomotives, deep well pumps, and what not.”23 In 1890, his life took a pivotal turn. The November 1890 Earlham College magazine noted that he was serving as head bookkeeper at Silver City Mining Co. in Lake Valley, New Mexico.24 But during one of his annual trips home to visit his family, he also had taken a civil service exam that led, months later, to his being appointed as a stenographer for the U.S. Life Saving Service, which at that time was part of the U.S. Treasury Department, in Washington, D.C., at the end of 1890. He would have been 23 at that time, and his autobiography reveals that

19 Garman. 20 “Personals,” The Earlhamite, Vol. XIV, 66, December 1886. 21 Jenkins, 49. 22 “Personals,” The Earlhamite, Vol. XV, 162, April 1888. 23 Jenkins, 59. 24 “Personals,” The Earlhamite, Vol. XVIII, 44, November 1890. 8 his travels out west had exposed him to a very different kind of life than the one he had known on the farm. Although he never denounced Quakerism, Jenkins had drifted away from his family’s religion by the time he was an adult. Nevertheless, as he started to make his way in the world, he would have done so through the lens of the Quaker values he was taught throughout his early years.

Jenkins’ Path to Full-Time Inventing

While working as a clerk, Jenkins took up photography as a hobby. That led him to develop an interest in “devices for recording and reproducing motion,” 25 since at the time the phrase “motion pictures” was not yet in use. Photography had become accessible to amateurs after George Eastman began marketing his Kodak camera in 1888, with the slogan “You press the button, we do the rest.”26 Once the pre-loaded film in the camera had been exposed, the camera’s owner would send the camera to Eastman’s Rochester, N.Y., factory, where the exposed film was developed, prints made, the camera reloaded and the prints and camera sent back to the owner. Also while working at the Treasury Department, Jenkins met his future wife, Grace Love, whom he courted for 11 years before they married in 1902. She worked in her grandfather’s eatery, the Log Cabin Café, at 1337 F St., N.W., near the Treasury building. During those early years in Washington he divided his free time between inventing and spending time with Grace. In 1895, he had resigned from his stenography job to turn his attention full-time to inventing,27 and their relationship progressed slowly because her family was not convinced that a man who listed his occupation as “inventor” was good husband material — something Jenkins’ own family questioned.28 Eventually, he proved his ability to make a living, and shortly after the wedding they purchased “a very modest little frame house, which was bought on small monthly payments, for the inventor was too poor to rent the house, the rent being $35 a month. Many a time the end of the month approached without the cash in sight, but before the end of the last day the $25.50

25 Jenkins, 70. 26 Riggs, Thomas, Encyclopedia of Major Marketing Campaigns (Detroit: Gale Publishing, 2000), 527. 27 Godfrey, 33. 28 Ibid., 12. 9 payment was always ready. This situation was repeated so often it came to seem uncanny, and was spoken of with almost reverential breath,” Jenkins wrote.29 Again, he referred to himself as poor — but how poor, really, is someone who owns a home? Although he and Grace never had children, Jenkins wrote warmly about his family and his trips home to visit them in Indiana. His still-living great-nephews’ memories of their beloved “Uncle Francis” are a testament to his devotion not only to his parents but to the many nieces and nephews on whom he doted.30 Jenkins also noted that they regularly attended worship services at a Methodist Church in Washington, D.C., since Grace and her family were Methodists and Methodist worship services by that time would have been similar to Quaker worship. Although Quakers originally sat in silence during worship, after the Civil War, many if not most Quaker meetings in the United States had embraced evangelicalism and the tradition of pastor-led (what the Quakers called “programmed” worship), mostly in response to the competition they faced when the so-called “Third Great Awakening” of Methodism swept the country starting in the mid-1800s through the early 20th century.31 It was not unusual for Quakers and Methodists to cross over from one denomination to the other, especially since the two denominations shared many of the same values. Both believed in witnessing and living according to the holy spirit within (versus living by rules laid down by a hierarchy of clergy) and believed that all people could enjoy eternal happiness in heaven (versus believing in predestination, which held that only a few people were bound for heaven and the rest were hopelessly damned). Years before he married Grace, Jenkins’ interest in photography had led him to experiment with motion pictures. In the early 1890s, he began shooting movies and experimenting with using various kinds of light to project film onto surfaces as small as a silk handkerchief. In 1894, he exhibited his projectors in Washington at the Pure Food Exhibition and the Capital Camera Club. After he enrolled at the Bliss School of Electricity that same year, he also exhibited his projectors there. It was at the Bliss School that he formed his ill-fated partnership with Thomas Armat, and the two men worked together on a projector for which they received a joint patent not long before they exhibited their invention in what has since been

29 Jenkins, 97-98. 30 Interview with Jenkins’ great-great-nephew, Philip Jenkins, in Richmond, Indiana, March 11, 2009. 31 Garman, and William G. McLoughlin, Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). 10 determined to be the first successful commercial motion picture showing at the Cotton States and International Exhibition in September 1895. For the next five years, as he and Armat fought over the rights to their patent, Jenkins continue to devote most of his energy to working on film projection. Not long after he and Grace bought their home, Jenkins delved into building automobiles. He built the first automobile to traverse the streets of Washington, created an automobile with a steam engine in front instead of under the seat and then built what he claimed was the first sight- seeing bus in 1901. When his financial backers for the bus “refused to put up any more cash,” it was sold at auction and taken to New York City. Ultimately, his forays into the automobile industry ended badly. In his words, “This inventor, like other pioneers in horseless carriage development, went broke.”32 But he rebounded and continued his life as an inventor. During the first years of the 20th century, he also created one of his most financially successful inventions: the disposable, paraffin-coated, cylindrical paper container used for a variety of products, including milk. Although he claimed a crooked attorney cheated him out of his royalties on the container, he received a substantial windfall of $10,000 for the sale of the container patent.33 He went on to develop motion picture projectors for educational and home use, both of which were commercial successes. During World War I, he worked with the government to adapt some of his inventions for military purposes. After the war was over, he purchased a surplus airplane that he used in a variety of experiments tied to his efforts to transmit still images by radio. Then, in 1921, he set up Jenkins Laboratories, a small but fully staffed laboratory adjacent to the capital city’s Dupont Circle — also in the northwest quadrant. He became best known as a pioneer in motion pictures and television, and by far the greatest number of his inventions and resulting patents had to do with projecting motion pictures in theaters, classrooms and homes, and with transmitting motion pictures by way of what Jenkins originally called “Radiovision” but would come to be known as television. But the full range of his abilities as an inventor is reflected in his lesser-known patents, which included an automobile steering device (1905), three flying machines (two patented in 1910, the third in 1911), a tire- repair device (1911), a device for aerial warfare (1915) and a lawn mower (1920). Jenkins also founded the Society of Motion Picture Engineers (now the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, with more than 10,000 members) in 1916. During the

32 Jenkins, 101. 33 Ibid., 104. 11 society’s early years, Jenkins and other pioneering members fostered a dialogue that led to 35mm film being adopted as the standard for the burgeoning motion picture industry.34 After struggling financially during the early years, Jenkins did come to experience financial success as an inventor, for which he credited his wife Grace. “It is to her kindly help and business wisdom, rather than to any personal ‘genius,’ that this inventor attributes such success as has attended his efforts,” he wrote.35 In 1929, three years before his death, after his failing health made it difficult for him to continue spending time in his laboratory, he sold Jenkins Television Co. for a million dollars, a fortune back then, and turned to writing his autobiography.

Working in Edison’s Shadow

Although Jenkins became well known in Washington, D.C., and some professional circles, and was regarded as a hometown celebrity back in Indiana, he never came close to being as famous as Edison, who was (and arguably still is) the most famous American inventor. Edison, who was 20 years Jenkins’ senior, had come of age at a time when various inventions — including the telegraph, faster printing presses, the telephone, the phonograph, motion pictures, radio and television — were bringing about a media revolution that rapidly transported Americans from daguerreotypes to motion pictures to radio to color television in less than a century.36 Reality was simultaneously overshadowed and amplified by a succession of new kinds of media representations of people, places and things. In Edison’s case, the reality was that he established himself as a budding entrepreneur well before he began inventing things. While working as a newsboy on a train from his home town of Port Huron to Detroit, he saw an opportunity to profit by purchasing cheap goods in the big city and bringing them home to sell at a markup. He opened stores in Port Huron where he hired two other boys to help him. Edison also started his own newspaper at age 15 and learned Morse Code, which led to work as a telegraph operator. It was in that last role that he started tinkering, getting supervisors’ permission to use idle and discarded equipment to try to send

34 Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, “About Us,” http://www.smpte.org/about/. 35 Jenkins, 97. 36 Daniel Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), 13. 12 telegraphs faster and print them mechanically. At 21, Edison already had attracted investors and helpers to fund and assist him in his work on such projects as improved telegraph transmitters, a stock price printer, a fire alarm and an electric vote recorder for legislators. He had also received the first of what would add up to a total of 1,093 patents by the time he died. He became a full- time inventor at age 22, in 1869. After several years of moving from venture to venture in Boston, New York, and several cities in New Jersey, Edison set up shop in Newark, where he met and married his first wife, Mary, who had come to work for him.37 He weathered the financial Panic of 1873 by selling the family’s home, but continued operating his laboratory. By the spring of 1876, he had moved his laboratory out of the city to Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he initially established a company called the American Novelty Company that sold practical inventions such as duplicating ink, electric engraving and sheep-shearing machines, as well as oddities like a low-tech sign used to show whether the office of an occupant was present or, if not, the time of return. That company failed, however, less than a year after it was created. Edison continued focusing on telegraphy, and after Alexander Graham Bell discovered that the telegraph could convey sound, which led him to invent the telephone, Edison then started tinkering with the telephone. The two inventors spurred each other on, each improving on the other’s latest invention and each holding telephone “concerts” in exhibition halls. Because Edison was partially deaf and was not a showman, his telephone concerts were presented by Edward Johnson, an energetic, technically knowledgeable promoter he had hired.38 During the course of the concert tour, Johnson also learned to navigate the media environment of the day, in which the people whose work reporters promoted in their stories were expected to indirectly reimburse newspapers by ordering extra copies of the issues in which the so-called “puff” pieces appeared. It was while tinkering with the telephone that Edison invented the phonograph at Menlo Park, and Johnson wrote a long letter to the editor of Scientific American about an Edison apparatus that could record and play back human speech. Response to the November 1877 publication of Johnson’s letter was the 19th-century equivalent of going viral, a testament to the magazine’s influence and the public’s thirst for new inventions. In fact, the machine described in Johnson’s letter was an early version of the phonograph that didn’t work. Nevertheless, it

37 “Thomas Edison and Menlo Park,” The Thomas Edison Center at Menlo Park, retrieved Oct. 21, 2018 at http://www.menloparkmuseum.org/history/thomas-edison-and-menlo-park/. 38 Stross, 24. 13 captured the imagination of writers who predicted the device could be used to reproduce what could become “echoes from dead voices,” “bottled sermons” and collections of speeches by great orators.39 The following month, while that letter was still fresh in people’s minds, Edison planned a trip with Johnson and Edison’s chief assistant, Charles Bachelor, to demonstrate the first working phonograph. They “walked into the New York Offices of Scientific American, placed a small machine on the editor’s desk and, with about a dozen people gathered around, turned the crank. ‘How do you do?’ asked the machine, introducing itself crisply. It itself was feeling quite well, it assured its listeners, and then cordially bid everyone a good night.”40 The editors were so astounded, so impressed, that they stopped the presses on the issue they were ready to publish on the very day of the demonstration, so they could insert an account of what they had seen. “Thanks to Scientific American, Edison would never again enjoy the sweetness of anonymous obscurity.”41 Members of the press started coming to Edison’s door, and he knew just how to entice them with hints about the next invention that was just within his reach. He intuitively knew that making a seemingly offhand remark about something he had just discovered would whet the reporters’ appetites for more without giving away how close he really was (or was not) to some new marvel.42 Reporters then drew their own conclusions, often speculating that the number of inventions Edison had in the works was much higher than it actually was. That cast Edison, who was then only 30, into the role of a superhero, eclipsing even contemporaries like Alexander Graham Bell. That superhero image was further amplified in 1878, when a journalist described Edison (with no acknowledgement of his staff) as “the wizard of Menlo Park.” That title alone gave Edison almost mythical status as a celebrity during a time when the industrialized print culture was transforming the relationships between the individuals who were written about in newspapers, magazines, books, and the people who read about them.43

39 Ibid., 34. 40 Ibid., 36. 41 Ibid., 37. 42 Ibid., 37-38. 43 Tom Mole, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy (Hampshire, England: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), xi. 14

Edison embraced his fame with enthusiasm and used it to great effect in marketing each new invention. He rapidly realized that his celebrity was good for business.44 He continued to send Johnson out to stage telephone concerts with the addition of the phonograph throughout New York and Pennsylvania. Later, at his lab in Menlo Park he staged demonstrations of the first commercially viable light bulbs. Although Edison faced the pressure of others’ expectations during the time between his theatrical demonstration of some new invention and the time he was able to get it to market, he was so skilled at manipulating the press that his superhuman image remained intact. The public started to see some cracks in that image, however, while Edison was fighting what turned out to be the losing side of the so-called “battle of the currents.” That battle began in the late 1800s while Edison and his Edison Electric Light Company (which later became part of Edison General Electric Company) were developing a direct-current electrical distribution system. At the same time, George Westinghouse, based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was developing a system that used alternating current, which was dominating the market in Europe. Westinghouse bought several of inventor Nicola Tesla’s patents and his Westinghouse Electric Company developed a delivery system that gave Edison stiff competition — and that rankled Edison. Although Edison once told a reporter, “I don’t care so much for a great fortune as I do for getting ahead of the other fellow,” 45 his actions prove otherwise. There is no question that profit was Edison’s motivation as he sought to protect his direct current patent royalties in the United States. There is also no question that he was willing to do just about anything to win. He carried on a years-long disinformation campaign, spreading false stories about accidents involving alternating current. He unsuccessfully lobbied state legislatures to adopt regulations that would set the maximum voltage below what was needed for alternating current. He also conducted experiments designed to demonstrate the dangers of Westinghouse’s system, the most gruesome of which were numerous public electrocutions of stray pets and unwanted livestock of various sizes, designed to show how quickly alternating current would kill. Edison’s loyal promoter and then-president of Edison’s company, Edward Johnson, wrote what was billed as a research report titled “A Warning from the Edison Electric Light Company,” citing various accidents with

44 Stross, 1. 45 David Traxel, 1898: The Birth of the American Century (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), 41. 15 alternating-current transmission lines as well as the deaths of the dogs and cats as evidence that Westinghouse’s methods were dangerous, and that Westinghouse cared little about public safety. The report also called Westinghouse a “patent pirate.” Westinghouse was furious and publicly threatened to sue for libel.46 When the State of New York decided to stop hanging criminals who were sentenced to death and to electrocute them instead, in the interest of providing them with a more humane execution, Edison publicly opposed that decision. But privately, he and his team of public relations experts plotted to sway the state to use alternating current in hopes that it could be used against Westinghouse. His hope was that the electric chair would become an icon for the deadliness of alternating current — “the executioner’s current,” as Edison called it, too dangerous for homes or neighborhoods. The first human execution by electric chair in 1890 went badly, failing to kill convicted murderer William Kemmler on the first try, which did not exactly support Edison’s hypothesis. A second jolt of alternating current, at twice the voltage, killed Kemmler but also caused his flesh to burn. Afterward, Westinghouse could be viewed as mocking Edison’ fear-mongering when he said of the execution, “It was a brutal affair. They could have done better with an axe.”47 The public did not blame Westinghouse for the botched execution. Instead, blame was placed where it belonged, on those who tested the electric chair and made the arrangements for the execution. And with that, Edison’s extreme efforts to turn the tide of acceptance against Westinghouse came to an end and alternating current won the so-called battle of the currents. It just had too many advantages. It was less expensive because the current could travel for longer distances over smaller, cheaper wires, making it possible to build fewer, larger power plants that were cheaper to operate and which could serve a larger area. The officers of Edison’s own companies had seen the handwriting on the wall, urging him to accept a merger with a rival company, and so had Edison himself. By the early 1890s, Edison had decided instead to withdraw both his money and his attention from his electrical power interests. “Edison was not interested in sticking around, merger or not. His direct current was going to lose the battle of the currents, and he could not accept graciously a prize for first

46 Craig Brandon, The Electric Chair: An Unnatural American History (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1999), 74. 47 Marc J. Seifer, Wizard: The Life and Times of Nicola Tesla: Biography of a Genius (New York: Citadel Press Books/Kensington Publishing Corp., 1998), 58. 16 runner-up.”48 The new officers of Edison’s company took control of the company and eliminated Edison’s name as the company merged with former rival and alternating-current company Thomson-Houston. The question of why that happened remains a mystery. Years later, one of Edison’s top assistants, who took over as chief executive of General Electric, said Edison did not want his name on the new company, although his grown children later said their father told them it was a lifelong disappointment to have had his name removed.49 In either case, that transition marked the end of a very public battle in which Edison neither ended up with a great fortune nor got ahead of the other fellow. In his battle against Westinghouse, however, Edison also had shown the lengths to which he was willing to go in an effort to win, and he later used some of the same strategies in his struggle against Jenkins. Edison spread misinformation about Westinghouse and his business; made false accusations; wrote articles and created misleading reports for the press; lobbied legislators; and even conducted cruel, public experiments on animals. It was not the last time that Edison would use such extreme tactics against those he viewed as adversaries. Just a few years after his fight with Westinghouse ended, competing inventors Woodville, Grey and Otway Latham, and Eugène Lauste, garnered headlines for promoting an early motion picture projector on April 21, 1895. Their projector was not very effective, casting its flurry of somewhat blurry images into a rectangle the size of a window sash, but newspapers relished the fact that Edison had been shown up by newcomers. One headline even proclaimed, “Edison not in it!” and Edison was taken by surprise. After losing the war of the currents, he had thrown himself into his struggling mining business and had left the development of his Kinetoscope idea to his assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson. The Lathams then lured Dickson away from Edison’s lab and started working on taking motion pictures literally out of the box, so that people could sit comfortably and watch a film instead of hunching over a Kinetoscope cabinet, peering into an eyepiece. Even though the Latham’s projected images were of poor quality, Edison needed to save face. So his agents purchased the Jenkins-Armat projector from Armat, without Jenkins’ approval, on the condition that Armat agreed to let Edison to introduce it as his own invention. When Jenkins tried to keep his name associated with the projector and later correct the record so as to receive recognition for his role in developing it, the grown-up Quaker farm boy found that he was ill-equipped to fight the well-honed fire and ire of Edison and his new partner.

48 Stross, 183. 49 Ibid., 188. 17

Jenkins and His Quaker Roots

It is clear from Jenkins’ autobiography that he found the city of Washington, D.C., mesmerizing when he first arrived, “with its attractions, its charming femininity and handsome manhood, its private and its official functions, resplendent with gold-braided officers and bemedaled ambassadors” and its cable car, which he found fascinating.50 But his experiences in the big city also reinforced the cliché of the unsuspecting country boy learning lessons the hard way from more worldly city dwellers. When Jenkins was growing up on the farm as a birthright Quaker (born into the Quaker faith), his parents emphasized the Quaker values of humility, honesty, simplicity and generosity. Although Quakers shared many values with other people of faith, their religious beliefs also dictated their behavior in many distinctive ways. While they looked in some ways like the Amish and other anabaptist groups, Quakers were not an insular community. Instead, they endeavored to live fully in the world, but according to their religious beliefs. They were known for speaking in an intentionally self-deprecating way, dressing well but plainly, doing business fairly, spending money conservatively, stewarding their financial resources wisely and giving to those who were less fortunate. They used the pronouns “thee,” “thy” and “thou,” which historically were used in society when speaking only to inferiors, to speak to everyone, signaling their belief in the fundamental equality of all people. They traditionally wore modest, plain, often grey or black clothing, free of lace, ruffles, cuffs and other unnecessary adornment, as a way of rejecting the vanity inherent in worldly fashion. They were the first to implement a fixed pricing system in doing business, to promote honesty, combat greed, and honor their religious belief that everyone should pay the same price because all are equal before God. And they were known for their kindness and generosity to others, so long as those people were endeavoring to live a godly life. Those beliefs and values manifested in Jenkins’ life in many ways. One of the most iconic stories he told in his autobiography was about an experience he had when still living on the farm, after a mechanical mower had stopped working. His father took Jenkins out to the field to help Jenkins and the farm hand figure out how to fix it. Jenkins quickly located the trouble and repaired the mower, but his father apparently noticed something he did not like in his son’s demeanor. “Perhaps the boy showed contempt because no one else saw the cause of the trouble, for the father reproved him, saying: ‘That is thy gift, and to thee it is no great credit.’ a remark

50 Jenkins, 68-69. 18 never forgotten.”51 Jenkins’ father’s message was clear: even those with the capacity to invent, then, should see their abilities for what they are: gifts, not achievements that set them apart. “The great inventor is doubtless born with inventing a natural gift, and, like the born artist, hardly deserves unusual praise for any particular piece of original work,” Jenkins wrote in his autobiography.52 Embedded in that lesson, however, were two other Quaker beliefs that remained central through Jenkins’ life and appear to be at the root of his disdain for education: That our individual talents are gifts from God, and we each have the capacity to communicate with God directly, without the need for clergy — or, by extension, teachers — to tell us God’s will to tell us how things work. There is historical context for Jenkins’ view of education. Early Quakers objected to the status and political power afforded to university-educated clergy in the hierarchical Church of England, and to the clergy’s abuse of that power. Quakers believed that no education was necessary for someone to effectively minister to others; instead, the main requirement was that the person be sufficiently in touch with what Quakers call “the God within” and which others might call the voice of God. Early Quaker congregations had no appointed ministers, no sermons, and no music, because their members wanted to strip away all the trappings of what they viewed as a church corrupted by vanity and greed. Instead of listening to a designated speaker, Quakers sat in silence until someone was moved by God to speak. Members served as ministers to one another, and the traits most valued among those with a gift for ministry were the ability to speak plainly, in a way that could influence even the meanest of people.53 Given their inordinate practicality, however, early Quakers realized that some form of education was necessary and, like many other groups of religious dissidents, they set up their own schools. George Fox, founder of the Quaker faith, authorized the first such schools for both boys and girls in Waltham, England, in 1668. Fox’s view was that students — both male and female — should be instructed “in whatever things were civil and useful in creation,” he wrote in his autobiography.54

51 Ibid., 48. 52 Ibid., xviii. 53 Barry Reay, Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J.F. McGregor, and B. Reay, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 149. 54 Fox, George, An Autobiography, edited by Rufus M. Jones (Philadelphia: Ferris and Leach, 1904) 461. 19

Higher education, however, was a different story. Early Quakers’ status as dissenters had precluded them from admission to universities such as Oxford and Cambridge, which focused on the classics, until 1871. 55 This, in turn, limited Quakers’ vocational opportunities. For very practical reasons, then, Quaker schools had a very different emphasis.56 One occupation that was open to them was farming. That contributed to the centrality of the natural sciences as Quaker education evolved in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.57 Knowledge of the natural sciences prepared young Quakers for useful work, which Quakers viewed as the antidote to poverty. Since many of the subjects taught in other English schools at the time focused on the classics or were more along the lines of what we might call “the life of the mind” in today’s educational parlance, Quakers rejected those subjects as superfluous and self-indulgent.”58 So long as students focused on serious subjects, intellectual precociousness was valued — but intellectualism met with disdain.59 American Quakers were not faced with the same restrictions, but many educational traditions survived the Quaker migration to the New World. American Quakers were not banned from attending universities, but they viewed most subjects taught there as “out of the wisdom of God.”60 Until about the mid-1800s, they also opposed higher education for fear that it might foster vanity and inequality. The first Quaker schools in America came into existence during the first half of the 19th century. They were closed to non-Quakers, and the students’ education was rigorously guarded. During the latter half of the century, things began to loosen up at Quaker schools, which began to admit non-Quaker students. Jenkins did not state whether his “country school” or high school were exclusively Quaker, but it is unlikely that there were sufficient students in such a rural area to populate a closed school. Since it is much more likely that he attended a public school, he would have received his education in Quaker faith and practice in “first-day school,” the Quaker equivalent to Sunday school, so called because Quakers preferred not to acknowledge the pagan and other connotations incorporated into the common names of

55 Helen G. Hole, Things Civil and Useful: A Personal View of Quaker Education. (Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press, 1978), 7-8. 56 Walvin, 97. 57 Ibid., 118 58 Hole, 7. 59 Emma Jones Lapsansky and Anne A. Verplanck, eds. Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption, (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 3. 60 Hole, 10. 20 days. Jenkins mentioned going to what Quakers would call “meeting,” or church, several times in his book. He also would have learned about Quaker faith and practice at Earlham College, which began as a closed Quaker boarding school in 1847 and retained its Quaker identity but had been admitting relatively small numbers of non-Quaker students since 1859, 25 years before Jenkins enrolled.61 From the time Jenkins could begin to grasp such concepts, his parents likely would have taught him that education did not make one person better than another or give educated people more authority, that the most important authority of all was the God within each of us, and that the primary purpose of education was the preparation for honest labor. It is not much of a stretch, then, to think that Jenkins would have viewed his God-given talent as the most reliable authority in his work as an inventor, and formal education as unnecessary. Those beliefs were clearly reflected in many passages about inventors and invention in his autobiography: The great inventor is doubtless born with inventing a natural gift … A born gift for inventing seems to disclose itself in childhood as an interest in new things, and accounts for the quick perception of the physical principles involved in each. Thus a store of specialized information is built up much more rapidly in such a mind than in the unobserving. This is probably the explanation of the mechanical cleverness differentiating between persons otherwise equally equipped, and doubtless accounts for the fact that the former quickly and almost intuitively finds the solution to each new problem.62

In his autobiography, he offered many examples of how his own experiences lined up with his description of how born inventors function. He described being fascinated by various equipment, both new and newly noticed, on the farm. To hear him tell it, he was constantly operating mechanical things or taking them apart to figure out how they worked, and he then used that knowledge when he was inspired to create some new invention that would solve a problem he had identified. One story about his gift for figuring things out focused on a contraption that engaged his imagination as it sat in a glass case in a corner of his country school. It had an air pump, electrical power supply, sparking tubes “and all other up-to-the-minute scientific apparatus, very complete, no doubt, for the time, though perhaps beyond most district school teachers, who probably knew little more about electrical apparatus than the pupils did.”63

61 Thomas D. Hamm, Earlham College: A History, 1947-1997 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 41. 62 Jenkins, xviii. 63 Ibid., 34. 21

The school trustees decided to give Jenkins the device, since nobody else knew what to do with it. He then began experimenting and, after his mother put the kibosh on his setting off chemical reactions in the device to send paper bags flying into the air, he settled for being able to amuse friends who “eagerly consented to ‘join hands’ and take the shock of a discharging Lyden [sic] jar, or watch the scintillating sparks in a vacuum tube.”64 By Jenkins’ account, even the teachers did not know how to work the thing — but young, gifted Jenkins figured it out. No teachers remain as witnesses to his brilliance, but this story attests to his assertion that true inventors’ gifts are not dependent on the contributions teachers make to the rest of us. His desire to be viewed as someone whose natural abilities were so formidable that he did not require any education was also embedded in his comments about great inventions being created by people lacking related expertise: … who are the discovers of great inventions? They are almost invariably not persons engaged in a kindred line of employment. This probably is because each knows nothing about the subject in which he essays to invent, and dares rush in where knowing ones hesitate. The inventor of the telephone was a teacher of the deaf; of the telegraph a portrait painter; of the disc talking machine a clothing sales man; of the monotype casting machine a groceryman; of the motion picture projecting machine a stenographer; of the pneumatic tire a physician; of the kodak (stet) a bank clerk; of the film roll a country preacher; the steam automobile a photo dry plate maker; the tunneling shield an editor; the dry-blast steel process a preacher's son; the stock ticker a dentist; the long distance telephone loading coils a professor of mathematics; the airplane bicycle repairmen.65

He referred to himself when he said the motion picture projector was invented by a stenographer, since he was serving as a stenographer with the U.S. Life Saving Service when he first began experimenting with photography and moving pictures. But that reference was also a peculiar literary turn he took throughout his autobiography, when he routinely referred to himself in the third person — as “the boy,” “the inventor,” or “Mr. Jenkins.” Again, that sense of quaint humility. Near the end of the body of the book, Jenkins reiterated his insistence that his talent for invention was inborn, and he made a case for a different kind of education for those who are similarly gifted: (Educational) opportunity for latent musical and pictorial talent is quite common, of course, and conservatories of music and art schools are maintained for this very purpose. But schools for the development of latent creative talent in mechanical,

64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 264. 22

electrical, chemical, and similar lines of human endeavor are lacking. The engineering, scientific, or chemical curricula of our colleges and universities cannot be so considered, for these studies are usually pursued as leading to a place in established industrial activities. They are never considered as an effort to develop latent creative talent to bring forth original additions to man's evolution in the tools of civilization …66

His belief that no such education existed at the time probably entered into the decisions he made in setting up Jenkins Laboratories in 1921: “A staff of young ladies and young men was gotten together, each selected for latent talent capable of being directed to the particular development planned,” Jenkins wrote.67 In an “appreciation” published after Jenkins’ death, his contemporary and fellow motion picture engineer, Lawrence C. Porter, said Jenkins chose his staff that way because “if Jenkins tells them it can be done, they believe it.’”68 Amateur historian George Clark, a retired RCA executive who began collecting materials about radio history while at RCA, had a different view of why Jenkins chose uneducated helpers: “He did not really believe in himself, so he had to have adoring unerlings [sic] to keep his ego pumped up.”69 But Jenkins also disparaged education in one of his most petulant criticisms of Edison (although again, he did not name the person he was talking about). Instead, he went so far as to belittle the college graduates he counted among Edison’s employees (although Edison himself, like Jenkins, touted his lack of education as a sign of his true genius). He then reiterated that only poor men had great ideas: “Research work is the new idea in inventing, and most large manufacturing concerns have adopted the plan, employing hundreds of young men, mostly college graduates, to improve present apparatus and methods, the patents being taken out in the name of the inventor, and assigned to the company. A notable example of this is the metallic tungsten lamp-filament which the scientific books told us could not be made, and explained why. But it was done because of the unlimited force of money and brains a big concern was able to bring to bear on the subject. It will be noticed, however, that the old rule still holds good, i.e., paid men only improve, while the revolutionary discoveries still continue to be made by the poor man — a further evidence that money has no brains.”70

66 Ibid., 194-195. 67 Ibid, 122. 68 Porter, 126. 69 George H. Clark, The George H. Clark Collection, Series 142: History of Television, Collection #55, Box 388, Folder 1, page 17 of notes Clark wrote in 1947 while preparing an article about the Jenkins Television Company, retrieved Jan. 26, 2009, in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution Museum of American History, Washington, D.C. 70 Jenkins, 271. 23

In that statement, Jenkins disparaged money along with education. He would have been raised to live simply, avoiding conspicuous consumption and ornamentation, but not necessarily to live an ascetic life. 71 He would have been taught that it was fine to make money so long as he did so through honest labor, did not let the pursuit of wealth interfere with his spiritual life, and did not spend carelessly or become wasteful with his resources.72 Quaker theologian Robert Barclay, one of the earliest and most influential Quaker writers, wrote that it was vanity, not riches, that Quakers should avoid. God rewards honest labor, he wrote, but not all work is equally rewarded: “God … doth, according to his own will, recompense and reward the good works of his children: and therefore this merit of congruity or reward, insofar as the Scripture is plain and positive for it, we may not deny,” Barclay wrote.73 Having wealth was not a violation of Quaker spiritual practice, but flaunting it was. Quakers valued quality workmanship but abhorred ornamentation that had no useful purpose because such ornamentation could be a distraction from conscientious spiritual practice. That notion was reflected in the eighteenth-century phrase “plain style, but finest,” widely used by Quakers.74 But Barclay also emphasized that Quakers should help the poor and share their material possessions in other ways that benefit the common good. Those who had more should share more, he wrote.75 The fact that Jenkins’ parents were deeply committed to helping others financially was evidenced by the fact that Jenkins’ father, who moved with his family to a house across the street from Earlham College after Jenkins left home, took on the responsibility of writing monthly letters and checks to retired Quaker pastors, drawing on funds contributed by Indiana Quaker congregations — something he did until the week he died in 1938.76 Jenkins’ romantic view of poverty also might have been influenced by the bohemian values that were very much in vogue when Jenkins came of age in the 1890s. By then, the word “bohemian” was used in reference to artists, writers and other creative people who would rather

71 Lapsansky, 23 72 Ibid., 5. 73 Robert Barclay, An Apology for the True Christian Divinity, The Seventh Proposition, Section XII, first published in 1678 (Glenside, Pa.: Quaker Heritage Press) http://www.qhpress.org/texts/barclay/apology/, retrieved Oct. 30, 2018. 74 Lapsansky, 23. 75 Barclay, The Fifteenth Proposition, Section II. 76 Garman. 24 live in shabby surroundings than conform to convention. The term originated with a collection of short stories by Henri Murger, published in 1845, then was used in the libretto of George Bizet’s opera Carmen to describe the heroine of that 1875 work. Puccini’s opera La Boheme, based on Murger’s stories and first performed in 1896, further romanticized bohemianism. The connection Jenkins drew in his preface between poor inventors and poor artists, both driven not by money but by their enjoyment of creating things, resonated with the bohemian notion of the starving artist, and it is likely he would have been exposed to those ideas either during his travels or after arriving in Washington, D.C. It is not hard to imagine him identifying with the romantic idea of being rebelliously creative. Although Jenkins did eventually become successful in business himself, he remained, at best, ambivalent about money. In this comment from his autobiography, he went so far as to extol the value of poverty and said it played a key role in motivating “real inventors”: Great inventions are born of the poor as often as of the well-to-do, and much oftener than of the rich. It is not believed, however, that the real inventors, as distinguished from the “improver of other people’s inventions,” are ever driven to their efforts by a desire for great wealth, but rather, like other artists, the musician, the painter, the sculptor, the poet, by a love of creative effort.77

That comment was echoed much later in the book, when he wrote: “paid men only improve, while the revolutionary discoveries still continue to be made by the poor man, a further evidence that money has no brains.”78 Throughout his life, he also cited a lack of wealth as a driver of his creativity. Twice in speeches he included his autobiography, a November 1924 radio broadcast and an undated address to the Calvary Methodist Church Men’s Club in Washington, he used identical words to make the same point: “I sometimes think that perhaps I myself may yet do something worth while if I only stay poor enough, long enough.”79 By the 1920s, saying he hoped to “stay poor” was a conceit, but it was a way that he repeatedly positioned himself in his own narrative. When he first moved to Washington, however, he would have been surrounded by ostentatious buildings and the vanity that is inevitable in politics, and he would have felt poor indeed in terms of knowing how to hold his own. His rural Quaker upbringing and time out west would not have prepared him for the kind of wealth and greed he encountered in the nation’s

77 Jenkins, xvii. 78 Ibid., 271. 79 Ibid., 209 and 259. 25 capital, and in his autobiography he joked that the hard lessons he learned in dealing with well- heeled people in his new city were like a “post-graduate course” in confronting treachery. He described pawning his wife’s wedding ring to pay a mail-order patent attorney $7.50 for a patent illustration that turned out to be a 13-cent zinc etching; he said a crooked attorney cheated him out of his royalties for a bottle capper he invented; he mentioned going after a company that was marketing without permission a gas stove he had patented; and he said he hired an attorney to press his case for nonpayment of royalties, only to have the attorney sell the royalty contract back to the non-paying company and pocket the money.80 But the cautionary tale that was by far the most painful to Jenkins was one he told in an April 1916 address to students at the Bliss School of Electricity, included in his autobiography. He did not mention Armat, but his reference was clear: “… be on your guard, for if your invention is good, you are likely, sooner or later, to meet a prosperous looking gentleman who sympathizes with you, says he believes in you, and you sign a contract with him and go to work to develop the invention, your time against the money he supplies. When you have the thing almost completed, and need only a little more, the promoter advises he will put up no more money, although, as a matter of fact, he has never put up any, the little cash involved coming from the friends you introduced him to. The business is then sold for debt, and you find you have the experience while the promoter has the more tangible assets.”81

Jenkins and The Motion Picture Projector

Jenkins started experimenting with motion picture projection soon after he arrived in Washington, D.C. He later said the idea for the projector had come to him in 1885, during his travels out west. As he stood in the Cascade Mountains, looking down into a valley, he noticed flashes of sunlight being reflected off of the axes of hundreds of workmen who were clearing a railroad right of way.82 That observation inspired him to begin working on a device he hoped could project moving images onto a surface some distance away. After several years of tinkering, in 1894, Jenkins enrolled in classes at the Bliss Electrical School, which the previous year began

80 Ibid., 104, 266-7. 81 Ibid., 266. 82 C. Francis Jenkins, Animated Pictures (Washington, D.C., By the Author, 1898), 26. 26 holding night classes on the third floor of 523 Ninth St. N.W., 83 a little more than a 10-minute walk from the Treasury building where Jenkins worked. Also enrolled at the school was Armat, a real estate agent and freelance inventor from Fredericksburg, Va., who already had studied at the Mechanics Institute in Richmond, Va. Armat became interested in the commercial potential of moving picture devices after he and his brother saw an exhibition of the Anschütz Tachyscope, a peep-show device similar to Edison’s Kinetoscope, at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The two men then discussed the possibilities for projecting moving pictures onto a screen.84 Armat also had interacted indirectly with Edison by that time. After Armat’s trip to Chicago, his longtime friend H.A. Tabb approached him on behalf of Norman C. Raff and Frank R. Gammon, exclusive representatives for Edison’s Kinetoscope and Edison’s films. Tabb wanted Armat and his family to provide financial backing for a Kinetoscope exhibition at the Cotton States and International Exposition to be held in Atlanta the following year, but Armat turned down Tabb’s request. “I could not see anything very promising in the Kinetoscope as a commercial project, but I could see a lot (of promise) in a machine … if the pictures could be projected on a screen,” Armat wrote years later. He told Tabb he believed he could devise such a projector, but Tabb said he doubted that because he knew that Raff and Gammon had urged Edison to develop a projector and he had failed to do so, which meant it clearly was impossible.85 Armat remained focused on the profit potential of a motion picture projector. When he told Professor Louis D. Bliss, founder of the Bliss school, about his ideas, Bliss introduced Armat to Jenkins. The two men formed a partnership in which Armat was to provide funding for Jenkins’ further experimentation. The words Jenkins used to describe Armat (whom he never names in his autobiography) are significant. In mentioning their first meeting in his autobiography, he described his former partner as “the junior member of a real estate firm in Washington, a man possessed of that great lubricant for inventions, money.”86

83 W. Andrew Boyd, Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia (Washington, D.C.: William H. Boyd Publisher, 1894), 11. 84 Kelkres, 50. 85 Thomas Armat, “My Part in the Development of the Motion Picture Projector,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 24 (March 1936), 242-3. 86 Jenkins, The Boyhood of an Inventor, 77. 27

Although Jenkins and Armat later disagreed about who contributed what to their joint project, the two men developed projectors that were good enough to use to successfully project motion pictures at the September 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Georgia. The projectors they took to Atlanta were the second version of the projector they devised — one that Jenkins called a “grand success” but which Armat assessed well after the fact as a “complete failure.” They had applied for a joint patent on the projector design on Aug. 28, 1895. They borrowed money from Armat’s brothers and other investors to erect a tent theater at the exposition, got some newspapers to write articles about their amazing invention and printed tickets. But few people came — largely because people were unwilling to pay 25 cents to get in because they had no idea what they would be seeing. To overcome that obstacle, the two men hired a barker. Visitors were invited to come see the show and pay only if they enjoyed it.87 That got people in the door, but patrons became uncomfortable when the lights were turned off before the film projection began. Expositions were viewed as dangerous places where thieves preyed on unsuspecting people, so the two still struggled to attract a crowd. At the time they were in Atlanta, numerous inventors were racing to see who could develop the first successful projector. Two other inventors were giving public screenings of moving pictures at the Atlanta exposition: the Latham brothers, who had gotten under the skin of Edison’s agents by holding small exhibitions in New York with a projector they developed and named the “eidoloscope.” According to both George Kelkres and film historian Charles Musser, however, the eidoloscope was technically inferior to the machine developed by Armat and Jenkins.88 The superiority of the Jenkins-Armat invention is also indicated by the fact that it was the projector Edison chose to license as his own invention, bestowing upon it the power and influence of his extraordinarily well-known name.89 When Jenkins described how Edison came to be credited with the projector the two men invented, he wrote, “One of the three projecting machines ... was taken to New York City by the promoter without the knowledge of the inventor, and exhibited before T.A. Edison’s representatives ... whereupon an arrangement was consummated whereby the machine was to be made and marketed by the Edison Manufacturing

87 David Nasaw, “Learning to Go to the Movies,” (American Heritage 44 (7), 1993), 78. 88 Kelkres, 56, and Charles Musser, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907 (Berkeley: University of California, 1990), 100. 89 Kelkres, 46. 28

Company, as the Edison Vitascope.” Again, the language Jenkins used to describe Armat is significant: he has reduced Armat to a mere “promoter.”90 Although Jenkins maintained he was the true inventor and Armat claimed that Jenkins’ projector only worked after Armat modified it, during their decades-long long feud each man also made conflicting statements as to what each of them contributed to the invention, each on occasion acknowledging the others’ contributions to the invention itself. The written contract signed by the two men on March 25, 1895 does little to clarify what role each man was to play.91 Suffice it to say their partnership turned out to be ill-fated, and the two men’s later accounts about what happened are mirror images of one another. In Jenkins’ words, here is how things went: In the winter of 1894-5 I met Thomas Armat and in talking of the moving picture cabinet device I had been publicly exhibiting in this city, I told him that ... I was anxious to build a carefully and well-made instrument for canvas (projection) work ... March 25, 1985 we entered into an agreement, the basis of which was that Armat, as financier, and with an almost unlimited supply of cash, against my ability and previous experimentation as an inventor in this art, was to furnish the funds necessary to the successful exploitation of the ‘projecting phantoscope’ ... Our initial effort ... was ... only partially successful, and subsequently, in July, 1895, Armat and I began the construction of a second machine, designed in accordance with one of the experimental devices I had shown him on (a) day in February when he visited me at my home. I, as before, designed and supervised the construction of the machine, and he paid the bills.”92

According to an article Armat wrote in 1935, however, events happened differently: "(I) agreed on March 25, 1895, to join with Jenkins under an agreement which he prepared. In April or May of 1895 we completed a projection machine ... (It) turned out to be a complete failure ... After that I took complete charge of further experimentation, at my own expense, and finally we produced the first projection machine ever made that embodied an intermittent movement (that eventually gained widespread use in film projection) ... Under the date of August 30, 1895, Jenkins wrote his friend (Ed) Murphy that the machine was a ‘grand success,’ but I regarded it as a complete failure ... and addressed myself to the task of devising a practicable machine. This I accomplished a short time after the failure of the Jenkins and Armat machine."

90 Jenkins, The Boyhood of an Inventor, 78-79. 91 Kelkres, 50-51. 92 C. Francis Jenkins to Henry Renno Heyl of the Franklin Institute, Aug. 27, 1897, photocopy of original materials held by the Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, Pa., in C. Francis Jenkins papers, Box 4, at the Wayne County Historical Museum, Richmond, Ind. 29

The only point on which the two men appear to agree is that Armat paid the bills. The signed contract in a scrapbook Jenkins donated to the Franklin Institute supported both men’s accounts of their respective roles.93 Both men were inventors and both held patents when they formed their partnership. Jenkins’ had secured one patent for a cabinet-style peepshow motion picture device and one patent for a projector. Armat, who was about 11 years older than Jenkins, held patents connected with the electric-conduit railway industry. According Armat’s testimony in the patent interference case, it was during the Cotton States Exposition that he shared with Jenkins his idea for adjusting their projector to reduce wear and tear on the film. He said he told Jenkins they should add a loop of slack ahead of the point where the film passed in front of the lamp — a technique that came to be known as the “Latham loop” because it was patented by the Latham brothers’ father, Woodville Latham (although its invention has been credited to William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, who also is credited with inventing the Kinetoscope while working for Edison in the 1880s). It seems to be more than coincidence that Armat got the inspiration he claims perfected the Armat-Jenkins projector during an exhibition where the Lathams were also exhibiting a projector that no doubt incorporated the all-important loop. Before any changes were made to the Phantoscope, however, on Oct. 13, 1895, Jenkins left Atlanta, taking one of the projectors when he went to attend his brother’s wedding in Richmond, Ind. While in Richmond, he used the projector to give a public screening there. After Jenkins’ departed, Armat stayed in Atlanta and began making modifications to the projectors to add the loop of slack. Jenkins, however, later claimed that the idea of adding slack was his, not Armat’s. Again, the idea likely did not originate with either of them. Two days after Jenkins left, on Oct. 15, 1895, the Phantoscope exhibit was destroyed when a can of kerosene exploded in a nearby building that housed an exhibit called the Old Plantation Show. The fire spread to adjacent areas, destroying the tent where Jenkins and Armat were showing their motion pictures, but the remaining projectors survived.94 In the end, the two men never managed to attract the big audience they hoped for, and they lost the $1,500 Armat had borrowed from his brothers and another $2,000 from underwriters to fund the exhibition.95 Nevertheless, they exchanged letters in late October 1895

93 H. Mark Gosser, in a December 2008 telephone interview. 94 History of Service: Atlanta Fire Department Commemorative Yearbook, (Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing Company, 2000) 77 95 Godfrey, 30. 30 that were cordial in tone. In those letters, they also discussed selling out to one another. It was not until that November that things reached a breaking point — and the two men’s versions of the story later became mirror images of one another. In an August 1897 letter to Henry Renno Heyl of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Jenkins said that in late 1895 he had been advised by the attorneys representing him and Armat that, since Jenkins had been the sole inventor of the projector, he should not have applied for a joint patent with Armat. The attorneys said Jenkins should have applied for the patent in his own name instead and then assigned to Armat his partnership interest in the invention. “To my surprise, and the chagrin of the attorneys, we learned later that this course was not agreeable to Armat,” he wrote. “I offered to submit the matter for decision to any competent authority Armat might suggest, agreeing to abide by the finding. Armat would not consent to an adjustment of our differences, and so (patent) interference proceedings were declared ...”96 Jenkins characterized Armat’s intent at that point as “to get entire possession of everything in sight,” and he went so far as to make criminal allegations against his former partner: “I have stated the case as briefly as possibly (sic), not making mention of the multitude of unfair methods employed against me, among which I might point to the forcing of a locked door to my residence during my absence, by a hired thief, to get possession of a Phantoscope to be shipped to New York and used as a pattern from which to construct like machines, rechristened the Edison vitascope,” he wrote.97 For his part, Armat said in court he had been warned by his cousin and business partner, T.C. Daniel, that Jenkins was “up to some crooked work” and alleged that, after Jenkins visited Armat’s office in early November and saw the modifications he had made to their projector, he had a drawing made of the modified projector for the purpose of applying for a patent in his name alone. When Armat saw the drawing later, at Jenkins’ residence, “I reproached Mr. Jenkins with what seemed to me to be his treachery in response to which he simply grinned and informed me that it would be a battle royal. I replied that I would endeavor to give him a run for his money and left the house.”98 Regardless of which man’s account — or both — are true, it is clear that the two men squared off at that point. Jenkins believed that the projector he developed with Armat was

96 Jenkins to Heyl, Aug. 28, 1897, 3. 97 Ibid., 3-4. 98 Motion Picture Patents Company v. Independent Moving Picture Company of America, United States Circuit Court for the Southern District of New York, Equity No. 5-167, 550-51. 31 substantially the result of work he had done prior to entering into their partnership. As a result, in November 1895, Jenkins had filed a patent application in which he asserted that he was the sole inventor of the projector. Armat’s position was that the projector he had devised with Jenkins did not work well, and only through his own individual modifications did it become commercially viable. In December 1895, both Jenkins and Armat arranged private demonstrations of the projector — but for very different audiences and with very different outcomes in mind. Jenkins took the device to Philadelphia, where he gave a lecture and demonstration to a distinguished audience at the Franklin Institute, in the hope of receiving acknowledgment for his invention from the science-focused institute. Armat contacted Raff and Gammon, the Edison agents who had, through Armat’s friend Tabb, asked Armat to sponsor a Kinetoscope exhibition at the Cotton States Exposition. Armat invited them to come to Washington “to see my machine,” and Gammon agreed to come if Armat paid his expenses — which Armat did. Each screening was successful in its own way — and each man’s success clearly aggravated the other. After Jenkins’ demonstration, he applied for the Franklin Institute’s prestigious Elliott Cresson medal for scientific and technological achievement, the institute’s Subcommittee on Science and the Arts evaluated his claims and he was nominated for the medal. After Armat showed Gammon the projector, Gammon was so impressed that he offered Armat a contract under which Edison would supply films and manufacture a limited number of machines that would be licensed for use on a royalty basis; Edison, however, wanted to see the machine himself before he decided how many of them would be made. That presentation to Edison took place in February 1896 — the same month Armat filed his own solo patent application for the projector he dubbed the Vitascope — a patent that was eventually granted. “The exhibition took place in a large room in the Edison plant (which by then was in Orange, N.J.) ... Mr. Edison was obviously surprised at the excellence of the exhibition and so expressed himself,” Armat wrote.99 Armat then agreed to serve as projectionist during the debut of the projector — dubbed “Edison’s Greatest Marvel: The Vitascope” — at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall on April 26, 1896, under Edison’s auspices and the crowd at the music hall went wild, chanting, “Edison! Edison!” 100 The rest, as they say, is history — but flawed history, since for decades most historical accounts failed to acknowledge Jenkins’ contribution to the invention of the first

99 Armat, 246-7. 100 Ibid., 247. 32 successful motion picture projector. Part of Armat’s deal with Edison was that he allow Edison to market the projector as his own invention, rendering Armat invisible along with Jenkins.101 But the projector that was marketed as the Vitascope was identical to the Jenkins-Armat Phantoscope.102 By the time of the screenings at Koster and Bial’s Music Hall, the partnership between Armat and Jenkins had completely deteriorated, along with any semblance of civility between them. In fact, tension had arisen between them soon after they began working together. Their relationship became strained as they worked on deadline to develop the projector they had paid in advance to exhibit in Atlanta. Their partnership was further tested by the hard work of continuously mending sprocket holes in the films that were torn by the not-quite-perfected machine during those exposition screenings. Once each man started acting in his own behalf during the months after their time in Atlanta, in the belief that he alone was responsible for the projector’s success, the soured partnership turned bitter. Within months of the music hall screenings, hearings were held before a Patent Office examiner on the 1896 patent interference case. The burden was on Jenkins to prove why his solo patent did not interfere with the Armat-Jenkins patent. In those hearings, Jenkins submitted drawings of a projector he said dated back to 1890 and 1891, the first two years he began experimenting with the notion of projecting moving pictures beyond the confines of the Kinetoscope. The drawings included elements unique to the Phantoscope, and he introduced them as proof that he alone deserved the credit for the creation of the first successful motion picture projector.103 Paper-dating, however, revealed that the paper on which Jenkins’ drawings were made had a watermark that indicated the paper was not even manufactured until 1894. That made Jenkins a liar and broke his case.104 It is impossible to reconcile the fabrication of those drawings with Jenkins’ religious upbringing. As a Quaker, he would have been taught to value honesty to the point of refusing to swear on the Bible when he testified in the patent interference case, because taking that oath would imply that he might not tell the truth otherwise. Perhaps Jenkins remembered having made similar drawings during the time period when he claimed the falsified drawings were made, so in

101 Stross, 209. 102 Kelkres, 57. 103 H. Mark Gosser, “The Armat-Jenkins Dispute and the Museums,” Film History, Vol. 2 (1998), 4. 104 Gosser, “The Armat-Jenkins Dispute,” 4. 33 his mind he was not falsifying but merely reproducing lost drawings from that time period. Anyone with experience in the legal system would have known that was a bad idea, but Jenkins later cited his inexperience in legal matters as one of the things that worked against him. In an Aug. 27, 1897 letter to Heyl, Jenkins said Armat’s wealth gave Armat too great an advantage: “... a person more experienced in legal matters would doubtlessly have seen the inevitable result of so unequal financial resources. It’s the old story over again, the inventor gets the experience and the capitalist the invention. I’ll know better the next time.”105 Regardless of Jenkins’ motivation, when he was caught lying about the falsified drawings, things turned against him. On Dec. 7, 1896, six days after the Franklin Institute voted to award Jenkins the 1897 Cresson Medal, Jenkins signed over his interests in the joint patent — a patent on the projector that, eight months earlier, Armat had promised Edison he could market as though it was his own invention — to Armat’s cousin and partner in their real estate business, T. Cushing Daniel. Eight days later, Jenkins abandoned his solo patent application and asked that the court render a judgment in favor of the joint application.106 But that was not the end of the disagreements between Jenkins and Armat. The bitterness over what had transpired between them continued throughout their lives and triggered Armat — and, later, Armat’s second business partner, Thomas Edison — to go on the attack every time Jenkins was recognized for his role in inventing the motion picture projector.

Armat Protests Jenkins’ Medal

When Armat learned that Jenkins had received the Cresson Medal, he wrote the institute to protest. It was an honor that Jenkins had pursued for himself — and himself alone. As Jenkins wrote, “the young man brought his picture invention to the attention of the Franklin Institute … giving a demonstration of such realism that a motion was made to have it come before the Committee on Science and the Arts … The Committee recommended that the Elliott Cresson gold medal be awarded in recognition of the invention of this wonderful machine.”107 The fact that Jenkins sought such recognition might seem at odds with his Quaker father’s view that inventors did not deserve any praise for their inventions. But by the time

105 Jenkins to Heyl, Aug. 27, 1896, in “The Case Files: C. Francis Jenkins,” The Franklin Institute. 106 Gosser, “The Armat-Jenkins Dispute,” 4. 107 Jenkins, The Boyhood of an Inventor, 79-80. 34

Jenkins took his case to the Franklin Institute, he had resigned from his job, determined to make a living doing what he loved the most: inventing, and it cost money to pay for materials and for people to help him. The medal would give him visibility and credibility that would likely appeal to potential investors, whom he could then pay back out of the proceeds from his patent sales. Claiming inventions as Jenkins’ own through the patent process and seeking public recognition of his abilities as in inventor would have been a necessary part of the job he had chosen for himself. At that point, Jenkins was not interested in manufacturing his inventions — just in selling the patents to others who could then use them to manufacture his creations (although he later marketed some of his inventions). In fact, Jenkins’ autobiography makes clear that, especially during his early years of inventing, he was not good at the business side of things. When asked during his presentation to the Franklin Institute if he could see a way to make the motion picture projector commercially viable, for example, he said he could not.108 Armat, on the other hand, clearly saw the economic potential of the projector when he contacted Edison’s agents, Raff and Gammon. Edison himself had lost interest in motion pictures after the flash-in-the-pan success of the Kinetoscope Company, of which Raff and Gammon were a part. After the Kinetoscope was invented in his lab, Edison had given a concession to its namesake company to market it. The company’s owners established the first Kinetoscope parlor in New York City in 1894 and placed the machines in businesses ranging from hotels to department stores to public parlors where people could also pay to listen to their favorite songs on Edison phonographs. But the Kinetoscope craze lasted less than a year and was a business failure, mainly because only one person at a time could watch the short films the devices played. The idea of projecting films so that they could be viewed by groups of people, however, had more potential for profit, which is what attracted Armat to working with Jenkins. After Armat teamed up with Edison, he public response to the film screening at Koster and Bial’s proved that they were onto something. By all accounts, it was a lucrative deal for Armat, but the money apparently was not enough. He was clearly bothered by the fact that Jenkins had received the Cresson Medal. In his correspondence, he told the Franklin Institute that he, not Jenkins, was the sole inventor of the Phantoscope (although he would contradict himself several years later in testimony he gave during a patent interference case his company filed against a competing motion picture

108 Ibid, 80. 35 company). Over a period of 10 months, Armat corresponded with the institute. Although Armat was invited to testify before the committee that investigated his claims, he did not do so.109 In the absence of that testimony, Armat’s case rested on “aspersions upon the character of Mr. Jenkins, which matters [were] not relevant to the question,” according to the report summarizing the investigation.110 In the end, the institute confirmed the validity of the award and Armat’s complaint was dismissed — but not forgotten, by either man. The only records of Armat’s 1898 protest are copies of only some of the documents, contained in Jenkins’ scrapbooks. All original records of the protest, except for some photographs, are no longer among the Franklin Institute’s archives.111 Armat’s aspersions on Jenkins’ character do not match opinions about Jenkins that were expressed by numerous others, ranging from family members to collaborators and even some people who worked for his competitors. Jenkins worked successfully with at least three other people before forming his ill-fated partnership with Armat — including James P. Freeman, whose primary role appeared to be funding Jenkins’ experiments in motion pictures.112 The fact that Jenkins could work graciously with others also is evidenced by his dedication of his book, Picture Ribbons, to portrait photographer I. D. Boyce for his “Courageous Sympathy and Ready Assistance Through Several Years of Experimentation.”113 Such an acknowledgment of gratitude generally does not come from someone of bad character. And Lawrence C. Porter described Jenkins as “a man of great vision, with the courage of his convictions; a man of indomitable will and boundless energy; a man having great love for his fellow men, a fine Christian character respected by all who knew him and loved by those who had the opportunity of being associated with him,” in an obituary in the September 1934 Journal of the SMPE (Society of Motion Picture Engineers), an organization Jenkins founded in 1916. It is worth noting that Porter gained that degree of respect for Jenkins even though Porter first met Jenkins while Porter was an engineer

109 Godfrey, 26. 110 R. B. Owens, Secretary, Report of the Subcommittee on the Protest of Thomas Armat against the Award of the Elliott Medal to C. Francis Jenkins for his Phantoscope, p. 2, Jenkins and Motion Pictures Scrapbook; Franklin Institute Papers, 35. 111 Gosser, “The Armat-Jenkins Dispute,” 5. 112 Kelkres, 47. 113 Ibid. 36 with Edison Lamp Works during the height of Edison’s efforts to monopolize the film industry.114 It is certainly possible that something in the dynamics of the relationship between Armat and Jenkins caused Jenkins to behave out of character. Based on Jenkins’ account of how things happened as their partnership deteriorated, Armat was of questionable character himself, resorting to theft to gain possession of the projector he later gave to Edison’s agents to be marketed as an Edison invention. “The so-called Edison vitascope is not an Edison invention at all. This machine, under the name Phantoscope, was exhibited at the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, Ga., 1895, and was on March 17th, 1896, surreptitiously taken from the writer’s residence, Washington, D.C. When the model machine was secured it was renamed the Edison vitascope,” Jenkins wrote in his book Animated Pictures.115 Jenkins also noted that Edison marketed the invention in a way that foreshadowed his protracted effort to litigate smaller, independent motion picture companies out of existence as he tried to monopolize the entire film industry. “The outfits [projectors] were manufactured for rent only, territorial rights being offered at exorbitant prices,” Jenkins wrote.116 Edison’s early collaboration with Armat, however, was to be short-lived. In 1897, Edison parted with Armat and his projector, and created and patented a projector of his own called the Projectoscope. That machine was succeeded by the first in a long line of Edison’s Projecting Kinetoscopes in 1901. In the meantime, Armat went out on his own in the wake of a February 1900 Patent Office decision that gave Armat and his Vitascope (an improved version of the Jenkins-Armat Phantoscope) “a practical monopoly of the (moving pictures) business.”117 Armat incorporated his company in West Virginia and offered for sale $1 million in stock, at $20 per share, and the company scheduled its first public motion picture screenings at Washington, D.C.’s Halls of the Ancients on Sept. 10, 1902. Although Edison and Armat eventually joined forces again, at this point they were competitors.

114 Luci Marzola, “A Society Apart: The Early Years of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers.” Film History: An International Journal, 2016; 28 (4), 25. 115 Jenkins, Animated Pictures, 17. 116 Ibid. 117 “His Patent Covers All the Moving Pictures,” New York Journal, Feb. 9, 1900. 37

Edison Tries Again to Create a Monopoly

Once Edison realized the money-making potential of motion pictures, he began operating by his “battle of the currents” playbook. In the earlier battle, Edison’s General Electric Co. had sought to stifle competition by merging with smaller firms, including the Edison Electric Co. After losing the currents battle, General Electric entered into an agreement with Westinghouse Electric Co. to create a “board of patent control” allowing the two corporations to share patent rights while freezing out other companies.118 When it came to the motion picture industry, in 1897 Edison began what some scholars have called “the patent wars,” going on the offense and using his considerable wealth to try to monopolize the entire, nascent motion picture industry. First, the Edison Manufacturing Co. notified film exhibitors and distributors they could be sued unless they used only Edison’s projectors and films. Then, Edison’s lawyers filed patent infringement lawsuits against pretty much anyone who was at the time seeking to produce and show motion pictures — 23 lawsuits during the four-year period from December 1897 through September 1901.119 Among the companies he targeted were the New York companies American Mutoscope and Biograph Co., founded by Dickson, Edison’s former employee, and Vitagraph Co., founded by a newspaper reporter who was persuaded by Edison, during an interview, to purchase a projector and set of films, and who the following year founded the Vitagraph Co. with a partner, in direct competition with Edison. He also sued the Lubin Co. of Philadelphia, founded by a Polish immigrant and photography expert who became intrigued with Edison’s motion picture projector and who then developed and marketed a similar, less expensive projector, and two Chicago companies that had established studios in southern California as a way of trying to escape the reach of Edison’s legal maneuverings: the Essanay Co. and Selig Polyscope Co. of Chicago. When Edison prevailed in these suits, he touted his successes in support of his quest for a monopoly. After U.S. District Court Judge Hoyt Henry Wheeler in the southern district of New York ruled July 15, 1901 that the American Mutoscope & Biograph Co. had infringed upon Edison’s patents, Edison wasted little time in calling attention to his victory. An ad placed in the New York Clipper 12 days after the ruling read, “WE HAVE WON. Decision Handed Down by

118 Robert Anderson, “The Motion Picture Patents Company: A Reevaluation,” in The American Film Industry, Tino Balio, ed. (Madison, Wisc.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 141 119 Janet Staiger, “Combination and Litigation: Structures of U.S. Film Distribution, 1896-1917, Cinema Journal, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Winter, 1984), 41-72. 38

JUDGE WHEELER of the UNITED STATES CIRCUIT COURT, Sustains THOMAS A. EDISON’S Patents on the Art of Producing Animated Pictures, and Grants MR. EDISON the Only Right to Manufacture Motion Picture Machines and Films.”120 Any dealership that promoted non-Edison films lost out on discounts and other incentives Edison offered to affiliates that paid Edison’s licensing fees. In addition, the film-manufacturing firms that did not go along with Edison’s scheme had to pay lawyers to defend them against Edison’s litigation, instead of spending that money on expansion or reinvestment in their studios. That crippled U.S. film production at the time.121 Ironically, both Jenkins and Armat took on Edison during that period. In 1900, Jenkins helped some independent movie producers successfully fight an Edison injunction by providing them with a camera that did not infringe on Edison’s copyright. The court ruled in favor of the independent producers and, in its 1902 ruling in the case, said, “The photographic reproductions of moving objects ... had been accomplished long before Mr. Edison entered the field.”122 In November 1902, Armat filed a patent infringement lawsuit on behalf of his new company, against Edison in the U.S. Circuit Court of the Southern District of New York.123 Although a preliminary injunction was filed against Edison, it was vacated a week later because of questions about Armat’s control of the Jenkins-Armat patent.124 But Edison’s sheer persistence paid off. In 1907, companies weary of being repeatedly sued by the monopolistic inventor started to make overtures to the Edison Manufacturing Co., regarding the feasibility of a licensing arrangement. By May of that year, numerous companies in the U.S. and abroad were considering a plan to merge with Edison. Not among them were Edison’s biggest competitor — Dickson’s American Mutoscope and Biograph Company; European film importer George Kleine, co-founder of the Kalem Co., and Armat, who along with Dickson and Kleine conducted a publicity campaign in which they decried the evils of “the Edison trust” in publications such as Show World, Moving Picture World, Views and Film Index, and the Chicago Tribune.125 The tensions that developed as Edison and his licensees squared off

120 Charles Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991) 176-7. 121 Anderson, 136. 122 Jenkins, The Boyhood of an Inventor, 101-2. 123 Armat Moving Picture Company vs. Edison Manufacturing Company, No. 8303, Circuit Court, Southern District of New York, filed Nov. 28, 1902. 124 Musser, Before the Nickelodeon, 236. 125 Anderson, 134. 39 against Biograph and other independents pushed the industry to the brink of collapse. Then Biograph purchased the patent on the Latham Loop at auction and turned the tables on Edison, seeking to have him and licensees stop using equipment that incorporated the loop that was on virtually all projection equipment in use at the time. By the summer of 1908, a truce was declared. Board members from Biograph and Edison held a secret meeting to create ground rules for a merger into a new corporation that would become known as the Motion Picture Patents Co. (although the existence of that meeting would be denied at subsequent antitrust trials). Armat and his company were among the many independent films companies that agreed to join the corporation and, by the fall of that year, the partners had signed an exclusivity contract with the Eastman Kodak Co., the only company producing commercial film stock. In mid-December 1908, the companies that banded together announced the formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company. Although the obvious motive of creating such a company was profit, company representatives touted its licensing policy as a means of regulating and protecting the budding film industry. They hoped that associating with Edison, who had a superhuman reputation as an incomparable genius, would have a legitimizing effect. In fact, the agreement did a good deal to stabilize the struggling motion picture industry through returning profits to manufacturers, spurring growth in that sector, setting flat rental rates, upgrading cinematic standards, insuring theaters against fire and accidents, and stopping the sale of films, which ended the circulation of inferior quality, old and damaged prints. But critics complained of arbitrary licensing agreements and abuses by Patents Company detectives, and in the end it was the monopolistic nature of the company that brought it down at a time when the Clayton Antitrust Act, passed in 1914, adding “exclusive dealings” agreements to the list of antitrust violations established by the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. In an antitrust case filed in the District Court of the United States for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Judge Oliver B. Dickinson ruled against the Motion Picture Patents Company on Oct. 1, 1915, saying the company’s policies went “far beyond what’s necessary to protect the use of patents on the monopoly which went with them.” After the Patents Company’s appeal was dismissed, the court terminated the existence of the company in 1918.

Jenkins’ Accolades Trigger Another Armat Attack

While Edison, Armat and other film companies were engaged in trying to keep the Motion Picture Patents Company intact, Jenkins received another medal from the Franklin Institute in 1913 — the John Scott Medal, again for a motion picture projector — and Jenkins donated projection equipment that was put on display at the Smithsonian National Museum. In 1916, Jenkins also founded the Society of Motion Picture Engineers with a goal of standardizing the motion picture industry, and he served as its first president during the organization’s first year. For a brief time, anyway, it appears Armat was too busy to bother feuding with Jenkins. But three years after the dissolution of the Patents Company, a May 22, 1921 article in the Washington Times praised Jenkins for his inventions on exhibit at the U.S. National Museum (now better known as the Smithsonian). That article apparently brought Armat’s long-simmering resentment to the fore again. He wrote a letter dated June 6, 1921, to Dr. Charles D. Walcott, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, protesting the labeling of three machines on display at the National Museum. He also apparently solicited letters in support of his protest from several other influential people, including Thomas Edison, a former secretary of commerce, an admiral, a patent lawyer and Ohio Senator Atlee Pomerene, whose letter simply stated, “I know nothing about the merits of this controversy, but I have known Mr. Thomas Armat well and favorably for 8 or 10 years. I would accept at par any statement that he might make.” In a letter dated nine days after Armat’s, the museum acknowledged his letter but said that the museum staff could not render judgment regarding questions about credit for inventions, and said such matters must be handled by the courts. Over the next two months, Armat and the museum exchanged further correspondence, but then it trailed off. Then, the May 1, 1922 issue of The American Cinematographer included an article titled “The Beginnings of the Cinema, Birth of the Final Form of the Motion Pictures — the Work of C. Francis Jenkins.”126 On May 10, 1922, the Smithsonian received another letter from Armat — this one a vitriolic, 36-page diatribe in which he repeatedly maligned Jenkins as “reckless to the point of stupidity” and “blindly obsessed” with overstating his role in the development of motion picture projection. Armat enclosed with the letter selected court records, photographs, letters and other documents. In the letter, he characterized Jenkins’ testimony in the original

126 Ben J. Lubschez, “The Beginnings of the Cinema, Birth of the Final Form of the Motion Pictures — the Work of C. Francis Jenkins,” The American Cinematographer, May 1, 1922, 19. 41 patent interference case as “full of misstatements from beginning to end, some of them entirely gratuitous and unnecessary. Most of these I shall ignore.”127 He then recounted at length the matter of the falsified drawings Jenkins had presented in the patent interference case. Armat dismissed the first Jenkins projectors he saw early in their partnership as “practically identical with the Edison Kinetoscope, in every detail” except for two modifications by Jenkins (although he failed to note that, in the world of inventions, one or two modifications can make all the difference). Armat said all projectors Jenkins built before he met Armat were worthless or had been previously patented by someone else, and Armat claimed that Jenkins fraudulently used a projector he did not invent, which he had borrowed from Armat to make the presentation that resulted in the Franklin Institute awarding Jenkins the Cresson Medal. Armat sought the following remedy: “I respectfully submit that the cluttering up of the cases of the National Museum with this mislabeled junk on the part of Jenkins, and whoever is associated with him in the matter, is an insult to the intelligence and, in effect, an assault upon the integrity of the National Museum and should be resented as such and the entire collection swept out of the Museum.”128

Near the end of his letter he also claimed he did not hold a grudge against Jenkins and, in fact, found him laughable: “I have not had anything to do with Jenkins since November 1895, but I bear him no personal ill will and heretofore his various (misstatements) have merely served to fill me with wonder and amusement. I would not go out of my way to interrupt the Jenkins comedy or do anything to damage him that could be avoided without injury to myself, but feel that misrepresentations affecting me have gone far enough and that I must take steps to correct them and this letter to you is one of the first steps.”129

The museum then assigned R.P. Tolman, an assistant curator at the museum, to conduct an investigation. Based on Tolman’s findings, the museum changed the labels on two exhibited projectors. Armat’s name was added to the label on an intermittent film projector previously marked with only Jenkins’ name, and a label that erroneously called another Jenkins projector a Kinetoscope was corrected. No change was made in labeling on a rotary lens camera on which

127 Thomas Armat, letter to Dr. Charles D. Walcott, Secretary, Smithsonian Institution, May 10, 1922, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Box 236 of 672, Folder 8, 73055. 128 Ibid, p. 34. 129 Ibid., p. 36. 42

Jenkins had received a patent.130 Armat went quiet again for another two years. Then, more than 20 years after his first attempt to get the Franklin Institute to strip Jenkins of the Cresson Medal, Armat took another run at getting that medal revoked. On Nov. 14, 1924, Armat wrote to the Franklin Institute requesting copies of his original correspondence as well as any documentation regarding the reason Jenkins received the Cresson Medal. The institute responded that they would not release that information without Jenkins’ permission, and Jenkins refused.131 At that point, Armat called in reinforcements, including someone he thought might have more influence: Thomas Edison, who had also received medals from the institute — the Edward Longstreth Medal in 1899 and the Franklin Medal in 1915. Edison wrote a letter in December 1924 saying he had learned about Jenkins receiving the Cresson Medal and he wanted official confirmation of the award as well as how it was worded. He got the same answer as Armat: Jenkins would have to approve the release of any information and, since Jenkins had just said no to Armat, it was likely he would say no to Edison as well. But Armat and Edison persisted. A month later, Samuel Insull, one of Edison’s longtime, right-hand men who was then president of Commonwealth Edison Co. in Chicago, wrote a letter marked “Personal & Confidential” to the president of the Franklin Institute. He claimed that honoring Jenkins as the inventor of the Phantoscope was a “gross injustice” to Edison. Another six months passed before Insull wrote again, saying he was turning the matter over to Edison’s patent attorney, Frank Dyer. Dyer claimed that the award enhanced Jenkins’ reputation and resulted in misrepresentations in textbooks, encyclopedias and other publications that caused a “grave injustice” to Armat, who was the true patent holder, and to Edison, whose work on projectors was ignored. But the Franklin Institute again upheld its awarding of the medal to Jenkins, on grounds that the original agreement between Jenkins and Armat said that Jenkins would do the inventing and Armat would provide the funds. Edison and Armat, however, were determined to prevail. They continued their campaign to remove Jenkins’ name from the record regarding the invention of the motion picture projector up until and beyond his death. In 1929, Edison threatened to file a lawsuit to deter Jenkins’

130 “Summary of Correspondence with Thomas Armat with Reference to the Fraudulent Nature of Motion Picture Apparatus Exhibited in the Museum in the Name of C. Francis Jenkins,” Smithsonian Institution Archives, Box 236 of 672, Folder 8, 73055. 131 “Case Files: Francis Jenkins (Phantoscope),” The Franklin Institute, https://www.fi.edu/case- files/francis-jenkins-phantoscope. 43 television experimentation, not because there was any real basis for a lawsuit but because he thought it would call attention to what he viewed as Jenkins’ mendacity.132 Also in 1929, Armat appeared in a news film short titled “Father of Screenland,” in which he described the steps in his (and only his) invention of the motion picture projector, as well as how he became associated with Edison. 133 Then, in 1935, after Jenkins’ death, Armat spoke before the organization Jenkins had founded — the Society of Motion Picture Engineers — and published the article in which he mentioned Jenkins but then claimed full credit himself for the modifications that made the film projector successful.134 In 1947, the year before his death, Armat received a special Academy Award along with three other motion picture pioneers — but not Jenkins. In the New York Times’ Oct. 1, 1948 obituary about Armat, it was clear that Armat had succeeded in writing Jenkins — who had died some 16 years earlier — completely out of his version of the story about how the motion picture projector was invented:

“In an interview with the New York Times, published on April 28, 1946, to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the public debut of the Vitascope machine, Mr. Armat told for the first time the story of his invention. He became interested in developing a means of ‘showing motion pictures continuously’ in 1893 when a friend sought to have him invest $2,500 in Kinetoscope machines and open peep-show parlors in Atlanta.

“Two years later, he was ready to demonstrate his new machine, to Raff & Gammon of the Kinetoscope Company, agents of the Edison machine. ... during the litigation (against Edison) in 1922 ... Mr. Armat received from Mr. Edison a letter stating in part: “You will probably notice in interviews given by me I have stated that I had a projection machine, but that when you came on the scene I saw you had a very much better one than mine, and that I dropped my experiments and built yours, which was the first practical projection machine.”135

132 Godfrey, 47. 133 “The Father of Screenland,” Pathé Audio Review, Vol. 1, No. 34, Van Beuren-Pathe, Dec. 12, 1929, a digitized version of a news short found among the Thomas Armat Papers, accessed at Georgetown University Library Archives, May 4, 2017. 134 Armat, “My Part.” 135 “Thomas Armat, 81, a Pioneer in Films,” New York Times, Oct. 1, 1948, 25. 44

Jenkins’ Accomplishment Recognized

The battle over credit for the invention of the first successful motion picture projector was not limited to Jenkins, Armat and Edison. As was true of so many inventions then and now, numerous inventors were working simultaneously on the same challenge. The question of who deserves credit for what depends on how each inventor’s accomplishment is worded. Various sources currently credit two sets of brothers — Max and Emil Skladanowsky and August and Louis Lumière — each with displaying “the first commercial exhibition” of motion pictures. The Skladanowsky brothers’ “first” involved the use of their Bioscop to show a motion picture to a paying audience in Berlin, Germany, on Nov. 1, 1895, and the Lumières’ “first,” with their Cinematographe, took place in Paris, France, Dec. 28, 1895. Although the Lathams garnered headlines with their eidoloscope demonstration in April 1895, it was not a public screening, so for decades Edison’s screening at Koster and Bial’s in April 1896 was recognized as the first commercial screening in the United States. In fact, the first commercial motion picture screenings anywhere were those by Armat and Jenkins, using their Phantoscope at the Cotton States Exposition in September 1895 — yet the historical record still does not reflect that consistently. That omission likely began after Armat cut his deal with Edison, allowing the renowned inventor to market the Phantoscope as his own invention, the Vitascope. Although Edison and Armat apparently reached an agreement at some point after their original partnership to allow Armat to claim credit for inventing and licensing the Vitascope to Armat, the two men clearly sought to keep Jenkins’ name out of the history books — and they succeeded for many years. But that began to change after a cascade of scholarship starting in the 1970s exposed some of Edison’s less savory character traits and brought Jenkins’ contribution back into the mainstream. The first book that at the time shockingly debunked Edison’s outsized reputation was A Streak of Luck: The Life & Legend of Thomas Alva Edison, by journalist Robert Conot, published in 1979. Conot drew on materials in Edison’s voluminous archives to paint a very unflattering portrait of Edison as a ruthless, opportunistic man driven by a hunger for wealth. Two years later, author and history professor Wyn Wachhorst took a more scholarly approach in writing Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth. He focused on the evolution of Edison’s image in American culture, analyzing the language used to describe him over time. He concluded that

Edison reached his prime about midway through his 84-year lifetime, but his superhuman image obscured that fact during the last half of his life. As the myths about Edison began to fall away, it would have provided the impetus for the long-overdue recognition to be given to those whose names had fallen into obscurity as a result of the dynamic interaction between Americans’ desire to romanticize Edison and the inventor’s own efforts to generate myths about himself. That would be especially true for those whose inventions were credited to Edison after his capacity for invention began to wane after 1890 — five years before he struck his deal with Armat. It is significant that Conot, writing two years before Wachhorst, described Armat as a Washington, D.C., realtor and credited him with the first public exhibition of a motion picture projected onto a screen, and he described Jenkins as “an associate” of Armat. But it was not until three years after Wachhorst’s book was published that Gene Kelkres’ article “A Forgotten First: The Armat-Jenkins Partnership and the Atlanta Projection” appeared in the Winter 1984 issue of the Quarterly Review of Film Studies. Kelkres had come across Jenkins’ name while he was a graduate student at Temple University in the 1970s, and he thought Jenkins had not gotten a fair shake with respect to being acknowledged for his role in creating the modern motion picture industry.136 Kelkres said little had been written about the Armat-Jenkins exhibition in Atlanta because it was little-known, and the records were hard to obtain and analyze. “Few know about the workings of the (Jenkins-Armat) partnership because historians have generally avoided the subject, for reasons grounded in obscurity and difficulty of the data,” Kelkres wrote.137 But Kelkres was willing to do the laborious research necessary to document Jenkins’ and Armat’s achievement. Film historian H. Mark Gosser, who edited the journal in which Kelkres’ article appeared, lauded him in a later article of his own for doing the laborious research reflected in the “Forgotten First” article: “Kelkres’ article is a triumph of a sort. Against staggering setbacks, he managed to locate and wade through voluminous court records and testimony, gather personal effects, and study material at archives to produce the fine piece.”

136 Gosser interview. 137 Kelkres, 45. 46

Kelkres’ article appears to have been something of a catalyst for renewed interest in Jenkins. Gosser wrote about the Armat-Jenkins feud for Film History in 1988. In 1991, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences began awarding an Emmy honoring Jenkins — called Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award — to those whose work over time has significantly affected television technology and engineering. In a 2005 article for Television Quarterly, titled “Radio Finds Its Eyes: The story of Charles Francis Jenkins, the forgotten pioneer of mechanical television.” Donald G. Godfrey cited Kelkres’ article.138 In 2011, both Armat and Jenkins were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for inventing the motion picture projector — but for different patents. Armat’s page said he was best known as the co-inventor of the Vitascope with Thomas Edison, although only Armat’s name is on the 1897 Vitascope listed on the Hall of Fame’s web page about Armat. Jenkins’ page on the Hall of Fame’s site says he was honored for his work in early cinema and television, and notes that he secured hundreds of inventions during his career. His page also mentions his claim to have used a projector to show a film to his family in Richmond, Indiana, in 1894 (a claim both Armat and Edison disputed in the course of their campaign against Jenkins). Curiously, the patent cited on the page about Jenkins’ induction is for U.S. Patent No. 671,111, which was not for a projector. That patent, awarded in March 1898 for a “viewing or reading apparatus with stereoscopic effect,” is for a cabinet device with a stereoscopic viewing eyepiece. Inside the device, two synchronized sets of images are displayed in tandem, one for the right eye and one for the left eye, to create a three-dimensional effect.139 Jenkins’ page does not mention Armat. Jenkins, however, features prominently on Armat’s page on the Hall of Fame’s Web site: “Thomas J. Armat was a pioneer of early cinema best known for the co-invention of the Edison Vitascope. His accomplishments include the development of motion picture projectors created in collaboration with fellow Bliss School of Electricity classmate Charles F. Jenkins.

“Jenkins had already invented a device for viewing motion pictures which he called the Phantoscope, a variant on the Edison Kinetoscope. Modifying the Phantoscope, Armat and Jenkins were able to develop a movie projector which used a new kind of intermittent motion mechanism, often referred to as a ‘beater

138 Donald G. Godfrey, “Radio Finds Its Eyes: The story of Charles Francis Jenkins, the forgotten pioneer of mechanical television,” Television Quarterly, Vol. IIIV, No. 2, Winter 2005, 47-52. 139 “Stereoscopic Mutoscope,” U.S. Patent 671,111A, https://patents.google.com/patent/US671111A/en?oq=U.S.+671%2c111. 47

mechanism.’ This modified projector was also one of the first projectors to use the Latham loop, an extra loop of film used before the transport mechanism that reduced tension on the film and avoided breakage. Also used in this projector was sprocketed film that would allow each frame to stop briefly before the lens. Both of these features are retained in modern film projectors. In May 1895, Armat and Jenkins had developed a projecting version of the Phantoscope and applied for its patent. The next year, Armat contracted with Thomas Edison to have the invention manufactured under the name Vitascope.”140

Three years after Jenkins’ and Armat’s inductions, Godfrey — apparently inspired by Kelkres’ article, which he cited again — published an exhaustive biography titled C. Francis Jenkins: Pioneer of Film and Television. “Jenkins,” he wrote “should be remembered as an inventor and a man of eminent forward-thinking ideas. In his own time, he ranked among the ‘Remakers of Civilization.’ He was described as ‘one of a trio of the nation’s foremost inventors’ and ‘one of the ten greatest figures in Motion Pictures,’” citing various news stories that described Jenkins as receiving those designations. Of course, Godfrey wrote about the entirety of Jenkins’ inventions, and devoted a lengthy chapter to the Jenkins-Armat-Edison feud. In the end, Jenkins appears to have won his lifelong quest to take his proper place in history for his contributions to the invention of the motion picture projector. Even Rutgers’ web site for the Thomas A. Edison papers now acknowledges him: “Edison played almost no role in the development of projector technology and other improvements in motion picture technology. Indeed, although the first projector used by the Edison film company was called the Edison Vitascope, it was designed by C. Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat.”141

Conclusion

It was not unusual during the time of Jenkins, Armat and Edison for one or more inventors to have a tug-of-war like the one over who deserved credit for the crucial modification that made Jenkins’ projector finally work well. Numerous other inventors had made incremental improvements in motion picture projectors for years, to the point that even specific modifications

140 “Thomas J. Armat,” National Inventors Hall of Fame, inductee web page, https://www.invent.org/inductees/thomas-j-armat 141 “Motion Pictures,” Thomas A. Edison Papers Web site, Rutgers University, http://edison.rutgers.edu/pictures.htm, accessed Oct. 9, 2018. 48 were named after their inventors, like the Latham Loop (although that was later determined to have been invented by a man who worked for Woodville Latham). As often happens when technology progresses to a certain point, more than one person makes the same intellectual leap to a new idea. Inventors may differ in how they try to bring the idea to fruition — as was the case with Edison and Westinghouse with distributed electrical current, and with Jenkins and Philo Farnsworth with television — but someone eventually succeeds, and receiving credit for being the one who finally made the idea work is usually crucial to reaping the profits for it. Alexander Graham Bell secretively copied part of a patent document filed by competing inventor Elisha Gray the same day Bell filed his patent for the telephone in 1876, but Bell was the one who profited from that historic patent.142 At the time the Wright brothers succeeded in making human flight a reality, many other inventors were working on the same idea. The Wright brothers exchanged letters with many friends and former collaborators who haggled with them bitterly over who deserved credit for what. The Wright brothers also engaged in a legal battle in which they sought to stop competing inventor Glenn Curtiss from making airplanes on grounds that he was infringing on the Wright brothers’ patents.143 Usually at issue in these battles, then, were two things: recognition and money, with the latter hinging on the former. The stakes were high. It is also significant that these battles unfolded during a time in U.S. history that was imbued with the exuberance and the rapacity of two overlapping eras: the golden age of invention, in which Americans romanticized inventors who created the new-fangled wonders that were transforming their lives, and the Gilded Age, marked by both fabulous wealth and abject poverty. During the late 19th century, U.S. factories dramatically increased their output, creating not just manufactured goods but also a new class of wealthy industrialists, a prosperous middle class and a great deal of poverty among the rural and immigrant laborers who kept the factories going. Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright Brothers became household names and reveled in the heady recognition and resulting wealth that America’s emerging, mass-media-saturated celebrity culture afforded them. In the case of Jenkins, Armat and Edison, however, their decades-long feud revolved around only one thing: Jenkins’ continued effort to claim credit for the invention that Armat built

142 Seth Shulman, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008), 103-4. 143 James Tobin, To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight, (New York: Free Press, 2003), 361-2. 49 his career on. The question of who would profit from the projector Jenkins and Armat worked on together had been settled early on, when Jenkins sold Armat his rights to their joint patent. But Jenkins clearly wanted to receive credit for the invention in the annals of history. As a quintessential independent inventor, Jenkins accumulated 400 patents for a wide range of inventions, working in a small lab with a few assistants and living out his years in the middle-class home he and his wife Grace purchased after they first married. He devoted much more effort to establishing his reputation as a serious scientist and inventor than to making money. Armat, who accumulated only a dozen patents (three before he met Jenkins, for a conduit electric railway, a railroad car coupler and a finger protector, and the rest involving improvements upon the projector patented in his and Jenkins’ name) was primarily a businessman who parlayed the joint Jenkins-Armat patent into a thriving, multi-million-dollar motion picture business and lived in a six-bedroom home called Greystone, which he had built in 1912 adjacent to Rock Creek Park in DC. Edison, who is often credited with inventing the modern research laboratory along with all the devices he patented, had by far the greatest number of patents by the time he died — more than 1,000 in the U.S. and another 1,000 or so abroad — but he did not invent a great number of those patented items, his staff did. For roughly the last half of his life, he lived in a 23-1/2-room mansion called Glenmont, which he bought near his West Orange, N.J., lab and expanded to 29-1/2 rooms. Neither Armat nor Edison had anything to gain financially, then, from battling with Jenkins. In the eyes of the public, Edison had invented the motion picture projector, thanks to his media-savvy staging of the debut of “Edison’s Vitascope” in New York City, and no one questioned whether the invention was his. Sometime later, when Edison credited Armat for the invention in correspondence with the Smithsonian, it escaped public notice. Yet the fact that both Armat and Edison carried on such a prolonged campaign against Jenkins suggests that they knew the truth, and they wanted to suppress it. It also suggests that Armat was willing to give up his place in motion picture history as having been part of the first commercial motion picture screenings in Atlanta because claiming that credit would have forced him to acknowledge that Jenkins was also part of that “first.” For his part, Jenkins had a different audience in mind as he sought credit for inventing the projector: the community of scientists, whom he viewed as kindred spirits. He wrote several self- published books, most of which were carefully detailed technical tomes describing the science behind his inventions and the way his ideas progressed over time. He supplemented his books

50 with carefully curated scrapbooks that included letters, news clippings and other materials that documented his story, his way — scrapbooks he later donated to the museums from which he had sought and received recognition. When he wrote his autobiography in his later years, he made veiled references to Armat and Edison, but never directly attacked them. Although he made some questionable choices while seeking to document what he invented and when, like the time he falsified drawings in the patent interference case, he was clearly focused on controlling his own narrative. To a degree, since they wrote letters but not books, Armat and Edison left their historical narratives to chance. As a result, little has been written about Armat, who left behind a relatively small cache of papers. By contrast, much has been written about Edison, which is not surprising given his larger-than-life reputation. Most things written about him during and well after his lifetime described him in laudatory, even reverential tones. Starting in 1978, however, when editors and scholars began archiving the more than 5 million documents held in the Thomas Alva Edison Archives at Rutgers’ School of Arts and Science, less complimentary portrayals of Edison began to emerge. It is certainly not possible to go back in time to determine what really happened between Jenkins and Armat, but it is clear that Jenkins had been working on developing a projector for some time when they met, and Armat began his partnership with Jenkins with an eye toward making motion pictures profitable. When Jenkins won recognition from the Franklin Institute and Armat acquired the rights to the joint patent, perhaps Armat feared that Jenkins would seek to interfere with his former partner’s ability to profit from the patent. That would have been understandable, given the cut-throat competition that went on among so many inventors at the time, but that was not Jenkins’ nature. Jenkins moved on to other inventions, and Armat stayed with Edison for a while and then moved on to create his own motion picture company. Perhaps Armat’s short time with Edison introduced him to the elder inventors’ approach to dealing with the competition, as exhibited during Edison’s campaign against Westinghouse: Try to squash anyone who gets in your way. Be decisive, persistent, dramatic, and do whatever it takes. By that time, Edison had honed his meanness, but Armat still had to fully grow into his. The fact that Armat boldly went on the offensive, suing Edison for infringing on Armat’s patents after Armat formed his own company, is a sign that he was catching on. Then, after Armat joined in Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company, he renewed and ramped up his campaign against Jenkins.

Time and time again, however, Jenkins’ community of scientists rejected Armat’s most strenuously worded accusations and upheld Jenkins’ claim to have invented the motion picture projector. In the realm of public perception, Edison remained the inventor, although he eventually acknowledged that Armat had licensed to him the projector he marketed as the Vitascope. And it was Armat alone who received an Academy Award as a pioneer of the film industry. As with the history of other inventions, however, scholars have now made substantial revisions to journalists’ first draft of the history of the projector. In the process, Jenkins’s contribution is being restored to the historical record, in large part because of his own diligent, sustained effort to tell his own story in the shadow the Edison myth. For other inventors and for historians, that is a lesson worth noting.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Original materials

Clark, George H., The George H. Clark Collection, Series 142: History of Television, Collection #55, Box 388, Folder 1, page 17 of notes Clark wrote in 1947 while preparing an article about the Jenkins Television Company, retrieved Jan. 26, 2009, in the archives of the Smithsonian Institution Museum of American History, Washington, D.C. Earlham College Archives, Richmond, Indiana. The Earlhamite, “Personals,” Vol. XIV (December 1886); Vol. IV (April 1888); and Vol. XVIII (1890). Godfrey, Donald G., “Radio Finds Its Eyes: The story of Charles Francis Jenkins, the forgotten pioneer of mechanical television,” Television Quarterly, Vol. IIIV, No. 2, Winter 2005, 47-52. Interview with Earlham College Professor Emerita of Religion and Quaker historian Mary Garman, at her home in Richmond, Indiana, Oct. 9, 1918. Interview with Jenkins’ great-great-nephew, Philip Jenkins, in Richmond, Indiana, March 11, 2009. Quaker Archives, Lilly Library, Earlham College, Richmond, Ind.

Books

Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1918. Anderson, Robert, “The Motion Picture Patents Company: A Reevaluation,” in The American Film Industry, Tino Balio, ed. Madison, Wisc.: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Barclay, Robert. An Apology for the True Christian Divinity. Glenside, Pa.: Quaker Heritage Press, online version of 1678 original edition. http://www.qhpress.org/texts/barclay/apology/. Berkun, Scott. The Myths of Innovation. Sebastopol, Calif.: O’Reilly Media Inc., 2007. Boorstin, Daniel, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.

Boyd, W. Andrew, Boyd’s Directory of the District of Columbia. Washington, D.C.: William H. Boyd Publisher, 1894. Brandon, Craig, The Electric Chair: An Unnatural American History. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1999. Fox, George. An Autobiography. Edited by Rufus M. Jones. Philadelphia, Pa.: Ferris and Leach, 1904. Godfrey, Donald G., C. Francis Jenkins: Pioneer of Film and Television. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2014. Thomas D. Hamm, Earlham College: A History, 1947-1997. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. History of Service: Atlanta Fire Department Commemorative Yearbook. Paducah, KY: Turner Publishing Company, 2000. Hole, Helen G., Things Civil and Useful: A Personal View of Quaker Education. Richmond, Ind.: Friends United Press, 1978. Jenkins, C. Francis, Animated Pictures. Washington, D.C., By the Author, 1898. Jenkins, C. Francis, Boyhood of an Inventor. Washington, D.C.: National Capital Press Inc., 1931. Also available online at the Internet Archives, http://www.archive.org/stream/boyhoodofaninven00jenkrich/boyhoodofaninven00jenkrich_djvu. txt. Kelly, Fred C. The Wright Brothers: A Biography Authorized by Orville Wright. New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1950. Lapsansky, Emma Jones, and Anne A. Verplanck, eds. Quaker Aesthetics: Reflections on a Quaker Ethic in American Design and Consumption. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. McGregor, J.F., and Barry Reay, eds. Radical Religion in the English Revolution. London: Oxford University Press, 1984. McLoughlin, William G., Revivals, Awakenings, and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607-1977. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Mole, Tom, Byron’s Romantic Celebrity: Industrial Culture and the Hermeneutic of Intimacy. Hampshire, England: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. Musser, Charles, Before the Nickelodeon, Edwin S. Porter and the Edison Manufacturing Company. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1991.

Musser, Charles, The Emergence of Cinema: The American Screen to 1907. Berkeley: University of California, 1990. National Inventors Hall of Fame, “Thomas J. Armat,” inductee web page, https://www.invent.org/inductees/thomas-j-armat. Reay, Barry, Radical Religion in the English Revolution, ed. J.F. McGregor, and B. Reay. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Riggs, Thomas, Encyclopedia of Major Marketing Campaigns. Detroit: Gale Publishing, 2000. Sayre, Robert F., American Lives: An Anthology of Autobiographical Writing. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Seifer, Marc J., Wizard: The Life and Times of Nicola Tesla: Biography of a Genius. New York: Citadel Press Books/Kensington Publishing Corp., 1998. Shulman, Seth, The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2008. Thompson, Holland. The Age of Invention: A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1921. Tobin, James, To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight. (New York: Free Press, 2003. Wachhorst, Wyn. Thomas Alva Edison: An American Myth. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981. Walvin, James. The Quakers: Money and Morals. London: John Murray Publishers, Ltd., 1997. Ward, Thomas B., Ronald A. Finke and Steven M. Smith. Creativity and The Mind: Discovering the Genius Within. New York: Basic Books, 2002. Webb, Richard C. Tele-Visionaries: The People Behind the Invention of Television. Hoboken, New Jersey: IEEE Press / John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2005.

Articles and Web sites

Armat, Thomas, “My Part in the Development of the Motion Picture Projector,” Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 24 (March 1936): 241-256.

Earlham School of Religion, “The Earlham Family,” http://www.esr.earlham.edu/about/earlhamfam.html (accessed April 20, 2009). The Earlhamite, “Personals,” Vol. XIV (December 1886): 66. Fell, Margaret, “A declaration from the harmless and innocent people of God, called Quakers,” a letter to the king of England on persecution in 1660, appended to William Shewen, The True Christian’s Faith and Experience Briefly Declared, (London, 1684-5, reprinted Philadelphia: M.T.C. Gould, 1830)Gosser, H. Mark, “The Armat-Jenkins Dispute and the Museums,” Film History, Vol. 2 (1998): 1-12. “His Patent Covers All the Moving Pictures,” New York Journal, Feb. 9, 1900. Kelkres, Gene G., “A Forgotten First: The Armat-Jenkins Partnership and the Atlanta Projection,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies (Winter 1984) Lubschez, Ben J., “The Beginnings of the Cinema, Birth of the Final Form of the Motion Pictures — the Work of C. Francis Jenkins.” The American Cinematographer, May 1, 1922, 19- 20. Nasaw, David, “Learning to Go to the Movies.” American Heritage 44 (7), 1993. Porter, Lawrence C., “C. Francis Jenkins: An Appreciation,” in Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, Vol. XXIII, No. 3 (September 1934): 126. Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, “About Us,” http://www.smpte.org/about/, (accessed April 29, 2009).