Charles Francis Jenkins

Charles Francis Jenkins was an American inventor active from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s who contributed to both early motion pictures and early television. In the 1890s he developed the Phantoscope, an early motion-picture projector, work he later sold rights to that fed into Thomas Armat's projector development. In the 1920s Jenkins turned to mechanical television, broadcasting some of the earliest experimental television transmissions in the United States and founding W3XK, generally regarded as one of the first television stations to operate on a regular schedule, though the mechanical scanning-disc technology he used was soon superseded by the electronic systems developed by Zworykin and Farnsworth.