Inventors of the phantascope and the largest brainwashing machine

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Many have tried to become famous on television or get rich with it. But only a few succeeded. Silvio Berlusconi is the media king in Italy, Silvio Santos is in Brazil, and who doesn't know Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner?

However, one of the first who tried to make money in this way, perhaps, was the inventor Charles Jenkins … It was he who received the first television license 90 years ago. However, like today, in his time there was someone who decided to get rich on his desire to make money.

Charles Jenkins

"Phantascope" or "Vitascope"

Charles Jenkins was born in Dayton, grew up near Richmond, but after graduation he moved to Washington, where he worked as a stenographer for some time. And it was at the Washington Patent Office that he appeared repeatedly. One of his first visits, however, turned out to be an unsuccessful and unpleasant experience for him.

Being still quite a young engineer and not knowing anything about commerce, Jenkins in 1891 decided to offer the patent office a "phantascope" - a cinema projector of his own design. He took an engineer as his assistant Thomas Armatato help him present the invention properly. Yes, only after the employees of the bureau studied the "phantascope" and the papers with the drawings, they announced that the apparatus had already been patented and was called "vitascope". The authorship of it and all rights belong to the famous inventor Thomas Edison … One of the bureau staff took pity on the grief-stricken inventor and told Jenkins that Edison "invented" his "Vitascope" from his drawings, a copy of which was sold by none other than Thomas Armath.

Jenkins did not succeed in defending his copyright for the invention in court - what a dispute with Edison who bought the drawings, and Armata was already gone.

Popular Radio magazine 1925

Picture on a handkerchief

But time has put everything in its place. Thomas Edison limited himself to buying a patent and did not seriously engage in further development. But Charles Jenkins continued to engage in television. In 1892, in front of a group of friends, he projected moving images onto a screen, and used a silk handkerchief as a screen. A year later, lamp arcs were added to the projector. This provided more powerful lighting and the picture became much clearer.

A year later, in 1894, he drew a diagram of the electrical transmission of images. And then work began on the topic, the collection of the necessary material and reflection. This took more than a dozen years. In 1913, Jenkins came up with the idea of wirelessly moving a picture of news from one settlement to another. But only in 1923 during the tragedy with the President of the United States Warren Harding, he ventured to send photographs of the president via electrical channels from Washington to Philadelphia. The distance was 130 miles. A year later, a facsimile of the US Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hooverwas already sent 450 miles - from Washington to Boston.

In 1925, Charles Jenkins demonstrated the first mechanical scanning experience using a revolving disc and rim system, produced with tiny lenses. In 1926, he already provided the US Navy with special flashing signals - to track changes in weather maps for ships at sea.

At the same time, Jenkins founds Charles Jenkins Laboratories. Now he was already able to broadcast the silhouettes of various objects over short distances.

And on February 25, 1928, Charles Jenkins, after receiving a broadcasting license, founded the Jenkins Television Corporation, which acquired the right to transmit images from Maryland to Washington.

Publisher Hugo Gernsbeck watches a broadcast from his own mechanical television station, WRNY. August 1928 chippfest.blogspot.ru]

Everything for the viewer! Who is he?

At first, the Jenkins Labs employees were the only viewers of this broadcast. Later, the laboratory also built the first transmitter, W3XK, in Washington. Shortwave stations then began transmitting "radio beacons" throughout the eastern states on a regular basis. It happened on July 2, 1928. The government even gave Jenkins $ 10 million to develop television communications. And by the end of 1928, there were already 18 broadcasting stations operating throughout the country.

But in order to expand the audience, a device for storing charge in a television tube was needed, which Jenkins proposed. The bottom line is that a capacitor was connected to each photocell of the photosensitive panel. The light fell on the photocell, the resulting current charged the capacitor during the transmission of the frame. And with the help of a switch, the capacitors were discharged through the RH load, from which the signal was removed. Thus, Charles Jenkins proposed using a discharge current as a video signal. With all this, it was necessary to think over where and how to place hundreds of thousands of small capacitors and create a switch that could discharge all these capacitors - no mechanical device could cope with this task. And the role of the switch was assigned to the electron beam. Over the next five years, engineers from different countries offered their own versions of the transmitting tubes.

Only in 1933 at the convention of the Society of Radio Engineers in Chicago Vladimir Zvorykin stated that his decades-long efforts to create a working television tube were successful.

Zvorykin with the help of a chemist Iziga found a simple method for making a mosaic photosensitive target with storage capacitors: a thin layer of silver was applied to one side of a 10 x 10 cm mica plate. The plate was placed in an oven; after heating, a thin silver layer acquired the ability to curl up into granules. Cesium was deposited on the silver layer; on the other side, the plate was covered with a metal layer. As a result, each of the million miniature solar cells also served as a miniature capacitor. And Vladimir Zvorykin called this pipe an "iconoscope".

Thirteen years after Charles Jenkins received his first television license, the first commercial television broadcasting license was issued in 1941.