100 Entrepreneurs Who Changed The World
92. Charles Francis Jenkins (1867-1934)
Charles Francis Jenkins was an American inventor, pioneer of early cinema, and one of the inventors of the television. In 1891, he quit his job to focus on developing his own movie projector, called the Phantoscope. In 1894, he debuted his “motion picture projecting box” to his parents, family, and friends at a local jewelry store in downtown Richmond, Indiana. He showed them a film reel of a girl he had filmed dancing in his backyard. Each frame had to be painstakingly hand colored. It was the first showing of reeled film with electric light before an audience and it was the first colored motion picture. Jenkins’s business would include Charles Jenkins Laboratories and Jenkins Television Corporation. Jenkins Laboratories was granted the first commercial television license in the US in 1928.
