Thomas Armat and Charles Jenkins, two men from the Washington DC area, develop America's first movie projector. This machine will be very important in film history, as its the first projection machine that Thomas Edison would market, but it is the damaged relationship between the two men that makes this an intriguing story.
Thomas Armat and Charles Jenkins, two men from the Washington DC area, develop America's first movie projector. This machine will be very important in film history, as its the first projection machine that Thomas Edison would market, but it is the damaged relationship between the two men that makes this an intriguing story.
EPISODE 16: THE POISONOUS PARTNERSHIP
Hi. Welcome to MATINEES ON MAIN STREET and my name is Alan. This is a podcast about the history of the movies, the people who started them, the people who made them, the theaters that showed them and those who watched them.
When it comes to calendar time, this podcast has lately been caught between April of 1894 and April of 1896. That’s the time between the first appearance of Thomas Edison’s peephole kinetoscope, and the first appearance of Edison’s projector in America. In between those two dates, a number of things happened. First of all the economy was on the skids. In 1894, there were strikes, as well as the march of Coxey’s Army, which was a large number unemployed men protesting economic conditions in America. At the same time, a Democratic president and a Republican legislature made it impossible to settle on a program that might correct the economic situation. As if that would really help.
The kinetoscope market collapsed along with our country’s ability to sell imports or to produce steel. And on the moving image front, a number of inventors devised projectors in hopes of exhibiting images for public entertainment rather than revealing them through a peep hole. After all, isn’t that they way they do it with magic lanterns?
One of these projectors, the Phantoscope, would end up becoming the Edison Vitascope, and its creation was the reason that Thomas Armat and Charles Francis Jenkins got together in the first place. Unfortunately, that promising start quickly turned caustic, leaving a trail of damage that makes it hard to know the details of the Phantoscope’s development, and at the same times dirties a few reputations.
The Phantoscope was one of several projectors that was developed in the wake of the release of the kinetoscope. I’ve previously mentioned why I think Edison released a peephole machine, but its quite surprising that a number of people chose to make projectors almost as soon as the kinetoscope was showing film strips. This really does suggest that Edison’s idea may not have been a good one, and it also suggests that many people really did see these early moving pictures as an extention of the magic lantern idea, rather than simply a boardwalk novelty.
The details of the development of the Phantoscope are not clear. Much of the problem stems from the hatred that soon developed between its main developers. In fact, there is more information about their hostility than there is about the development of their film projector. Both Armat and Jenkins had mechanical experience, and neither one was an employed machinist when they started to develop the Phantoscope. Instead, they were employed in white collar jobs with mechanical science being more of a dedicated hobby.
Armat was from Fredericksburg, Virginia, not far from where he set his adult roots in Washington DC. He had a curiosity about mechanics and inventing, and even patented a railroad coupler. As for Jenkins, he was born in Ohio but raised in the small town of Richmond, Indiana, and by 1890, he was working as a stenographer in Washington DC. Armat also appeared in DC around this time, in order to work for his cousin as a real estate agent. Between the two, Armat was doing quite well, while Jenkins was living hand to mouth.
The next substantiated fact about them appears four years later, in October of 1894, when both Armat and Jenkins were both taking classes in electricity at Professor Bliss’s School in Washington DC. Between their arrivals in the capitol, and their attendance in the class, Jenkins actually built a moving picture projector. Armat later said did Jenkin’s first projector didn’t show a big enough picture for it to be useful in exhibiting moving pictures to an audience. Why and how Jenkins made the machine is a part of early film history that has no proven answer. Of course, early film history is riddled with these mysteries. For example: so far, no one knows if William Friese-Green actually exhibited his films. Or why didn’t Edison make a projector instead of a peephole machine. I’m sure you should know by now, that my guesses on that last mystery are exactly that – guesses. Still, the mystery of Jenkins work is the only unanswered question that is defined by a terrible public argument that leaves no details, but inspired a great questioning of the facts by film historians.
To be very fair, Jenkins is an important inventor, having contributed to the development of the radio and television, so although he may come off as a crank to some, he definitely is not. After all, his Phantoscope, in the guise of the Vitascope, would become one of the two major cameras at the start of the movie era. So first, lets look at what Jenkins said about the making of the machine.
Jenkins said that in the early 1890s, he started to indulge his interest in mechanics by investigating the moving picture process and inventing moving picture machines. He said that previously, when he was hiking in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, he spotted men clearing away trees for a railroad, far in the distance, and would have liked to have preserved this image as the men moved about their business. This was in 1885 when he was nineteen years old. Interestingly, this was the only cinema origin story concerning a movie pioneer that didn’t involve witnessing something proto-cinematic, such as a Muybridge show or seeing some kind of semi-moving picture machine at a fair.
In 1890, he moved to Washington DC, got a stenographer’s job in the government, and started to invent in his off time. According to Jenkins, he concluded that if he wanted to make a movie projector, he would need a camera to record images first. Without it, you couldn’t tell if the projector was really working. His camera was a four lens machine that recorded its images on film that would wrap around a rotating drum. He didn’t use a camera shutter due to the low lighting situation, and the slowness of the film. He also started on the projector he had planned to build, experimenting with both intermittent and continuous drives. He quickly realized the importance of the intermittent process, and spent a lot more time on developing it than he did on the projection process.
Finally, according to Jenkins’ claim, he took the machine back to Indiana and demonstrated it to his family and a few friends at a local jewelry story. Supposedly, that was in June of 1894. That placed the Indiana projection date as a few months after Edison first released his peep-show kinetoscope.
That, in a nutshell, is Jenkins’ version of the story of the development of the Phantoscope. That’s just the beginning of all the contradictions. Now let’s look at what’s on the record, beyond what Jenkins said.
First of all, Jenkins would attend Bliss’s School of Electricity, along with Thomas Armat, in October of 1894. To be fair, Dr. Louis Bliss didn’t have a school then. It was simply a night class being held on the third floor of the Water Building in Washington D.C. In other words, it was one class, and Jenkins and Armat were fellow students in the same class. Dr. Bliss had started the course just the year before. When you consider Jenkins future work, it’s easy to see that he took this class to further his knowledge of electricity. In the 1920s, he used early radio receivers to act as receivers for his newly devised television screens, and set up America’s first televised broadcasting system.
As for Armat, the reasons for taking the class was probably the same. Although he sold real estate, he had patents to his name. It’s possible that his interest in electricity was furthered by his work on railroad inventions, and the country’s growing interest in electric streetcars. That thought was mentioned by Terry Ramseye. Ramseye also mentioned that Armat had recently run into an old friend, H. A. Tabb. Tabb worked for Raff and Gammon, of all people. He traveled the East Coast, attempting to convince amusement people to buy kinetoscopes. He seems to have wanted to convince Armat to invest in the machines, but Armat wasn’t interested in peephole consoles. It’s possible that this discussion also included Armat’s observations about seeing the Electrotachyscope at the Chicago World’s Fair.
A month after the beginning of the classes, Jenkins showed his Phantoscope at the Pure Food Show in Washington DC. The Pure Food Show was part of a trend that would lead to the Pure Food And Drug Act that future President Theodore Roosevelt would push through Congress in 1906. These shows were designed to inform people of food purity, the dangers of food adulteration, and even how to cook them properly. The Phantoscope seems to have been a kind of knock off of the kinetoscope, although that is not how Jenkins would later describe it. Why Jenkins’ Phantoscope should be exhibited there is not known, but there was obviously a place for it as entertainment, and the only references to the machine in the local newspapers was that quite a number of people spent time viewing the film clips it showed.
It was probably in the weeks after the show that Louis Bliss suggested that his two inventors get together. When the two finally agreed to former a partnership of sorts, it was in March of 1895, and it was to improve Jenkins’ machine, and Armat was to finance the project.
Armat liked what Jenkins had. According to Armat, he had this kinetoscope knock off, as well as a multi-lens camera, capable of taking moving pictures on film. After writing up an agreement, the two men set out to develop a projector. So why were they going to make a projector if Jenkins already had a faux-kinetoscope? I don’t know. Maybe it had to do with the fading success of the kinetoscope. What they created was a machine that ran continuously, rather than intermittently. This was due to Edison’s use of the continuous run in his kinetoscope. Looking back, this is an interesting comment, because Jenkins claimed that he had already devised a projector using an intermittent process.
After they experimented with it, both men were aware of the limitations of the continuous run process, and Armat decided to switch to the intermittent process. At least, that’s what Armat said. This was around the same time that the Lathams were also investigating an intermittent device. Armat also claimed that he devised a loop system, as well as a continuous feeder gear, ideas very similar to the Lathams.
I suppose any one with a suspicious frame of mind might wonder if this idea was shared or stolen in some way. The Lathams were working in Manhattan, and Armat and Jenkins did their work in Washington DC. The only possible connection between the two groups would have been Mr. Tabb. As I said earlier, Tabb was a kinetoscope salesman, working for Raff and Gammon. He would have undoubtedly known the Lathams, as they were the men who introduced boxing into the kinetoscope machines. But that’s just my guess. What I wonder is would he have known about the work they were doing on projectors? I don’t know. For example, did Tabb visit their workshop at any time? It was in lower Manhattan. Did the Latham brothers talk about their work vwith Tabb? According to one source, the Lathams perfectly willing to let the public know that Dickson was working with them, despite his attempts to keep them silent about the issue. That’s sounds a bit like the Lathams were willing to talk freely about their project.
What about Armat? Did Tabb know what his friend Armat was doing? And in particular, as Tabb was responsible for setting up the large kinetoscope display at the up and coming Cotton States Exposition, did he and Armat share any information prior to the exposition? Both Tabb and Armat had displays at the show. And it would be Tabb who would ultimately present Armat’s and Jenkins’ machine to Raff and Gammon, and eventually Edison. If someone wants to do some real research on this issue, feel free. I’m not suggesting that this did happen, but for someone with a conspiratorial frame of mind, the thought is there for the taking.
The Cotton States Exposition was an attempt to create a Columbian Exposition redux. Chicago was given the opportunity to host the Columbian Exposition as a display of how much it had recovered since the Chicago fire, so Atlanta was going to show the world how the South had recovered since the Civil War. While Chicago’s purpose was to highlight its expanded culture, especially in the arts and architecture. For Atlanta and the South, the proclaimed purpose of the fair was to highlight the South’s new found sense of equality towards the blacks. A whole building was set aside for Negro culture. This meant celebrating the African-Americans who were progressing in education, the sciences, and the arts, including literature, and traditional music. Ironically, this celebration was capped with a speech by celebrated educator Booker T. Washington, who promoted the idea of a separate but equal system of segregation, an idea that would soon be supported by the Supreme Court.
Raff and Gammon, Armat and Jenkins, and the Latham brothers were all there, somewhere. Gray Latham was promoting their eidoloscope outside the fair, at least one source says. Raff and Gammon’s southeast representative, Frank Harrison, was promoting both the Edison kinetoscope and the phonograph at the Midway. Armat and Jenkins were also at the Midway, tucked into a corner, next to the performing animal area. Through the summer, they had struggled with their machine, primarily due to the poor quality of the gears they used in their intermittent mechanism. The repeated stopping and starting caused loud noises and caused one main gear to break. Ramseye said that Armat would keep that broken gear as a paperweight on his desk for the next twenty years. At 40 times a second, the intermittent device had to stop and start 2400 times in a minute, but the motor was only able to drive it at half that speed. Precision design, and miniature sizing had not yet come to moving making machines. They applied for a US patent just a week before the Lumieres did. That difference would be Edison’s triumph in the end.
Armat also had to borrow at least $1,500 from his brothers to set up a small building that included two theaters, and yet they were still short the money for promoting their Phantoscope. As for film clips, there is some suggestion that they made a few of their own although others truly doubt it. Instead, Armat and Jenkins were probably using Edison kinetoscope clips for their exhibitions, and as usual, the most popular of them was the Annabelle dance clips. I’ll talk about them in a few episodes, but for now, I’ll mention that two sources have been attributed to those films. One was the kinetoscope representative in Washington DC, which was probably Tabb, and another was Gray Latham. There’s those connections to Latham and Tabb again.
Armat and Jenkins arrived in Atlanta in late September, but Jenkins immediately returned to Washington to finish making up two other projectors. At that time, despite his charm as a real estate agent, Armat was not doing well promoting the Phantoscope or the movies. You know hat exhibition theater that Armat set up to exhibit the films that cost his brorhers $1500? It turned out to be much darker in there than Atlanta audiences had expected, and they quickly left. Much of this may simply have been that some of those people had a natural fear of carney tricks. But the Raff and Gammon people, as well as Gray Latham were also doing poorly. And to be truthful, there would be a continual distrust of the movies in the South in general over the next several decades.
When Jenkins returned, the hope that he and Armat could set up a second theater, now seemed like a waste of time. By late October, Jenkins took off with one projector to attend his brother’s wedding and impress his family with what he had accomplished. That would be the end of the partnership.
Jenkins would later say that this was his second trip to Richmond, Indiana, with the projector, but there’s reason to believe that this is not true. For the most part, historians tend to believe what Armat told Terry Ramseye in the 1920s. But the problem is that Armat is telling a story that happened twenty five years earlier. How good is anyone’s memory about an incident that happened a quarter century earlier? As for Jenkins, his version of the story was told only a few years after their break up. Still, his version of the facts reveals even more errors than does Armat’s quarter century old story.
The trip to Richmond started the great unraveling. There, Jenkins projected his moving images to his family and friends, and a local newspaper wrote up the story. At that time, the Phantoscope was still having problems with the intermittent mechanism. Because it was a demo, it was still not as finely built as it would later be. Its lack of mechanical perfection caused the projector and film to shake, and occasionally damaged the film. Both Armat and Jenkins knew this, but separately, they came to two different conclusions. Armat wanted to continue investigating the problem in order to fix it. Jenkins wanted to redesign the machine from scratch. And he wanted to do it alone. After all, it was his machine in the beginning.
But there was a major problem with Jenkins’ change of plans, and that was the patent they had both filed in August. When they both met in Washington DC in November, they argued and went their separate ways. Previously, while Jenkins was impressing his family in Indiana, a fire had broken out at the fair’s midway, causing unknown damage to the two remaining Phantoscopes. Armat decided to take the two machines and put at least one of them in the basement of his real estate office. After all, he now owed his brothers close to $2000. While Armat was concerned about money, Jenkins seems to have been more concerned about his reputation, and did something quite unusual. First, he filed a new patent application on the same machine, this time listing only himself as the inventor. That was going to cause a lot of confusion at the patent office. The second thing he did was to take his machine to the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and give a presentation promoting himself as sole inventor. At that time, the Franklin Institute was probably as well known as the Smithsonian Institution, maybe even more so. Gaining some kind of accreditation from them would be a monumental step in being called the sole inventor of the movie projector.
What was said in Richmond that caused Jenkins to suddenly abandon his partner and attempt to rewrite the situation? Why was he making it look as if he was the only one to produce this accomplishment? Were Armat’s comments about his contributions to the projector simply self serving attempts at boosting his own claim to the machine? Despite the lack of acceptance by the fair crowds, there were people in the business who were quite impressed by the Phantoscope, and this included the men working for Raff and Gammon. Were they whispering in Armat’s ear, and offering good money? Who is right, and who is wrong? Or is this a case where the truth lies somewhere in between?
Around the same time that Jenkins gave his lecture at the Franklin Institute, Armat started to negotiate with Raff and Gammon about selling of the rights to the Phantoscope to them, and possibly the Edison group. Among the points of discussion was that all the credit, and therefore the money, would go to Armat. Raff and Gammon did know about Jenkins, so the one thing they wanted was for Jenkins to return the single machine that he had in his possession. This was the machine he used in Richmond. Surprisingly, he did so. In a later podcast, I’ll discuss the Edison angle of the Phantoscope, but for now, I’ll just focus on this unstable relationship and Raff and Gammon’s attempt to secure it financially.
Like the Lathams, Raff and Gammon had come to the conclusion that the true future of moving images was projection, not squinting into a peephole. At least projectors would stave off the novelty’s economic collapse. At the end of 1895, there had not yet been a successful exhibition of projected moving pictures in America, unless you count the Lathams’ frustrations with the Young Griffo and Charlie Barnett fight. . On the other hand, word must have arrived about the several successful showings going on in Europe, including a number of Lumiere showings that would lead to their first public showing in Paris, right after Christmas. The Skladanowskys also had their Winter Garden exhibitions just a month earlier. Either the French were going to control the movie business or the Americans would, that is, if the novelty proved to be popular.
Raff and Gammon had heard good things from their salesmen about the Phantoscope, although they tended to doubt its success. Frank Gammon personally visited Armat at his real estate office and the two men took a small walk into the basement to look at the machine and test it. Gammon voiced his doubts, while Armat explained his ideas for improving the machine, and Gammon left the office quite impressed.
Everyone agreed that Raff and Gammon would look for a manufacturer, with Edison Manufacturing topping the list. Still, it would be necessary to tie up all the legal loose ends before manufacturing started. This would mean prying the stray machine from Jenkins’ hands, and eventually getting him to surrender his rights to the patent. This would seem rather dishonest, except that Jenkins’ had already done so by submitting a new patent. Its not known whether there are any other differences between the two patents except the name of the inventor. But when the US Patent Office called a hearing late in that new year of 1896, Jenkins submitted documents that were later proved to be forged. This was the year that Jenkins started claiming that he had invented the movie machines in 1890 and 91, all by himself, rather than with the help of Thomas Armat in 1895. It was shown that the documents were on a type of paper that was not available until 1894.
So, in late 1895, or early 1896, Raff and Gammon were able to convince Jenkins to surrender his claims to a machine he probably first devised, and improved with the help of Armat. Jenkins also continued to pursue his claims about inventing the machine at the beginning of the 1890s, with the Franklin Institute backing him up. There the issue sat as the movie industry mushroomed across the world, and Edison projectors started selling in a way that the old inventor could never have dreamed of. By the 1910s, movies were a national obsession, theaters were opening up everywhere, Edison controlled the patents, and new and used projectors were selling like hotcakes.
By the end of World War I, speculation started to rise over who had invented these machines. Back at the end of the 19th century, both the Franklin Institute and the Smithsonian had displayed projectors giving Jenkins full credit for the machines, and the Franklin Institute had awarded a medal to Jenkins for his efforts. Armat protested the award, but his claims were ignored. The Smithsonian started an investigation, while the Franklin Institute reopened its previous claims to his award. Part of the problem was that Armat’s name had pretty much disappeared from the record, and that Jenkins had been able to bury what was left of Armat’s name under a paper trail. There was the book he wrote in 1898, which is where the story at the beginning of the podcast came from. In fact a whole new set of incidents were all part of this recreated legend.
Probably the one that stands out the most was an article in the Richmond newspaper from 1919, that “copied” an article they had been written in 1894 concerning a demonstration that Jenkins had given to his family and friends at his father’s jewelry store in June of that year. Some of the facts strongly parallel the October 1895 article printed in the Richmond paper. It seems as though Jenkins’ has an obsession with recreating dates and facts. Even some of the dates about his work in television have been called into question.
At the same time, while Jenkins may have been spinning a paper lie, Armat, while forgotten, still had family money, and the residuals he had from becoming the “sole” legal inventor of the Vitascope, Edison’s projector. Terry Ramseye said that each man got what he wanted; Jenkins got fame and Armat got wealth.
The true answers to “who did what” will never be known, so, generally, people just credit them both. Its hard to tell why Jenkins suddenly turned on Armat. Was Armat the kind of man that someone like Jenkins would naturally distrust? Was it simply a question that Jenkins thought the machine good enough, while Armat wanted to improve it some more? The Raff and Gammon mechanic who did much of the physical work on the Phantoscope said that Jenkins was an impatient man, while Armat was very thorough and careful in his work. And maybe its true what Ramseye said, so that Armat was just in a hurry to prove his greatness.
Contrary to what the general public believes, the world of inventing has always been a shark pool of danger, with distrust, deceit and legal manipulation appearing at many turns. Edison’s shiny reputation has long been tarnished with accusations of idea theft, and using the legal system to destroy others. Some of that will happen in the history of the movies.
At the same time, this kind of manipulation was going on everywhere within the world of inventing. Edison learned his tricks from Western Union and from other inventors. Alexander Graham Bell had a father in law who would do it for him. So did many others. Its a glossy, simplistic, Pollyanna view we have of the 19th century. That belief deludes us into thinking that somehow things were better for our ancestors, or in some circumstances, worse, and that somehow we are not like them. Still, despite all the corruption, there are very few invention stories in the history of the movies as bizarre as the Armat-Jenkins fight.
While this battle for credit left a confusing paper trail, its not an uncommon issue in researching history, especially film history. In an industry that abandoned its past, leaving it to crumble into dust, or explode into flame, there is a good amount of missing information that can only be assumed or patched together with circumstantial information. This is a thought to keep in mind as we pass through the history of the movies.
As for the results of this publicity battle between Charles Francis Jenkins and Robert Armat, it will lead us into the story of Thomas Edison’s projector when it comes to light in a few episodes, but next time, I’m still looking at the early camera inventors by taking a visit to France’s premiere manufacturing city, Lyon.
Thank you for listening.