Did Television Begin in Dupont Circle?

One summer day century ago, a crowd packed a second-floor office on Connecticut Avenue near Dupont Circle. The space held the labs of inventor Charles Jenkins, and people had come to watch a 10-by-12-inch “radiovision” screen, onto which a shadowy image of spinning windmill blades soon flickered into view. The model windmill was being blown by a fan at a naval research facility in Anacostia; the image was sent to a rooftop antenna and broadcast to Jenkins’s lab. The audience applauded as they witnessed these “motion pictures by radio,” as the Washington Post described the technology. We now call it television.

That day, June 13, 1925, is a good candidate for the moment when TV broadcasting was born—or at least first witnessed by the public. Later that month, Jenkins secured a patent for the technology, and three years after that, he debuted a TV station he called W3XK—likely the very first television station with any regular programming. For the next six years, W3XK broadcast regular shows, initially from an antenna atop the same Dupont Circle building. You could tune in from around the city if you happened to have the proper equipment and wanted to watch dim silhouettes of actors moving around in silence.

These days, the building at 1517–19 Connecticut Avenue houses part of the bookstore Kramers as well as doctors’ and psychotherapists’ offices. There’s not much to indicate its illustrious role in media history. Its landlord, Pete Hiotis, decided to change that. This year, around the 100th anniversary of the broadcast, he plans to have a seven-foot plaque installed in front of the building to honor the “birthplace of television” and Jenkins. He also recently added a sign to the front door that reads “Jenkins Laboratories.” And when DC completes its plan to cover the Connecticut Avenue underpass in front of the building with a public plaza, Hiotis hopes it will be named Charles Francis Jenkins Plaza. “If you go to Kitty Hawk, the state of North Carolina has a 60-foot granite monument dedicated to the invention of the airplane,” he says. “It seems remarkable that no one knows about this. Something needs to be done.”

The building’s history wasn’t a secret, but it wasn’t well known, either. Today, the room where those first images were seen is an airy psychotherapist’s office, and clients may have little sense they’re in the spot where TV broadcasting came into existence. Hiotis, who grew up nearby, found out about it after he bought the building in 2016 and noticed some quirky elements. “There were weird porcelain switches and cotton-enclosed electrical wiring,” he says, which reminded him of an old laboratory. He searched the address in Library of Congress records and discovered Charles Jenkins Laboratories.

Though TV’s earliest history can be hard to pin down, Jenkins is a universally recognized pioneer. A Midwesterner who attended the now-defunct Bliss Electrical School in Takoma Park, he established himself in DC as an all-purpose inventor—a kind of lesser-known Thomas Edison who created an early film projector, disposable milk bottles, and a steam-driven automobile that moved so slowly, neighborhood kids could literally run circles around it.

After reportedly getting a letter from a deaf child who asked for a machine that could show sign-language messages across a distance, Jenkins and his assistant, Florence Clark, came up with a way to send moving images of hands via radio waves. They showed it privately to military and other officials in 1923; the windmill broadcast two years later was its public unveiling.

Jenkins isn’t the only pioneer credited as an inventor of television: In the late 1920s, Philo Farnsworth became famous for his electronic TV systems, while John Logie Baird used an improvised contraption to broadcast a blurry image two months before Jenkins’s windmill demonstration. But Jenkins’s claim to the title seems strong because the sign-language broadcast came earlier.

At the unveiling at the Connecticut Avenue lab, attendees were impressed, if perhaps unaware of the world-changing implications. “Although the image broadcast was devoid of dramatic interest of itself,” the Post noted at the time, “the men who witnessed the accomplishment expressed amazement and showered compliments on the inventor.”

This article appears in the June 2025 issue of Washingtonian.

Ike Allen

Assistant Editor