NPC in History: The face that launched television?

Browsing through the National Press Club’s 1936 Year Book, I saw a timeline of great events in Club history up until then. There, for the year 1923, it said: “Premier television demonstration.”

Television in 1923? That was 16 years before David Sarnoff introduced all-electronic television at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and 24 years before Howdy Doody first aired.

What happened at the Club that early?

Digging into the internet, I found a reference to an inventor named Charles Francis Jenkins, who was doing experiments about this time in transmitting pictures over the air. That led me to a book about him by Donald G. Godfrey, an emeritus faculty member at Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

And there, in Chapter 8 of “C. Francis Jenkins, pioneer of film and television” was the story.

Jenkins had demonstrated his technology in March, 1923, by sending a photograph of President Warren Harding by radio from the Naval Air Station, then in Anacostia, to the Philadelphia Bulletin 130 miles away. The Bulletin lauded it as “the first time in the world’s history … (that pictures had been sent) from city to city.”

But the journalists at the Club were still skeptical, and they invited Jenkins to conduct a demonstration on April 28. Jenkins eagerly accepted.

This time the photograph Jenkins transmitted was that of the Club’s president, Carter Field, a reporter for the New York Tribune. Jenkins explained to Club members the technology of scanning and relay, and then demonstrated the transmission of a clear photograph of Carter.

The resolution that reporters had seen in the previous demonstration already had been vastly improved, as no lines were apparent in the transmitted photo. As the Washington Post reported, Jenkins proposed that his system provided reporters a means “by which sport news pictures could be broadcast and picked up by every newspaper subscriber … (Such a plan) would give the San Francisco newspapers pictures of spot news in New York as promptly as the Boston newspaper got it.” In fact, he claimed that “every newspaper in the country would get its spot news pictures in the same five minutes.”

After his Club demonstration, Jenkins found a way to transmit moving images. At first, they were only silhouettes. But soon black-and-white moving images could be sent. In 1928, the Jenkins Television Corporation opened the first television broadcasting station named W3XK, transmitting first from the Jenkins Labs in Washington, and then from Wheaton, Md. He developed an audience by marketing television receiver kits that could be connected to a standard radio receiver and tube amplifier.

By 1932, his mechanical technologies began to be overtaken by electronic television systems, and Jenkins has been largely forgotten. Philo Farnsworth has a statue in the Capitol lauding him as the inventor of television. But it was the transmission of Club President Field’s photo that made believers out of many Club members.

This is another in a series provided by Club historian Gil Klein. Dig down anywhere in the Club’s 110-year history, and you will find some kind of significant event in the history of the world, the nation, Washington, journalism and the Club itself. Many of these events were caught in illustrations that tell the stories.