Televisionary Biddle

Television, so far, has been an amusement for amateur electricians and material for Sunday newspaper sections. That television might soon be something else was indicated last week by an advertisement which appeared upon financial pages.

The advertisement made it known that C. C. Kerr & Co., of the New York Curb Market were offering for sale 250,000 shares of common stock priced at $10 a share in the Jenkins Television Corp. (total capitalization $10,000,000). The purpose of the Jenkins Television Corp., as expressed in a letter written by President James W. Garside, was to "transmit or broadcast television pictures and programs; to transmit photographs ... to engage in the broad development, exploitation and sale of television and image transmitting apparatus. . . ." The advertisement pointed out that the development of television so far has paralleled that of the early development of radio; and it indicated that Jenkins Television Corp. hoped to duplicate -the grandeur of Radio Corp. of America.

Whether it will do so or not, no one can say. The success of the new organization depends largely on the past and future prowess of C. Francis Jenkins, who invented "the first practical motion picture projector," and whose laboratories have recently been devoted to televisionary experiments. The announcement of the new capitalization came at a time when Wall Street was talking of nothing but the break in the market and made therefore less stir in financial circles than it would have a week before.

It made however a stir in sections of Manhattan where business is the subject of smart chatter. In the smart restaurants of lower Park Avenue, headwaiters consulted patrons differentially but earnestly. There were two reasons why they did so: Headwaiters yield only to speakeasy owners as shrewd investors; many a headwaiter was acquainted with the young and impressive Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr. who was named to head the board of directors of the Jenkins Television Corp.

Like almost every presentable young club member in Manhattan, Anthony Biddle Jr., has been called the city's best dressed man. At the age of 18, he married Mary L., the 28-year-old daughter of Benjamin Newton Duke, the tobacco king.* Tongues wagged and darted, but the Biddies, in Palm Beach, Newport and Manhattan, for which they had deserted the native Biddle heath of Philadelphia, gave evidence of marital contentment. Tony Biddle played tennis, squash and swam, occasionally boxing at the Racquet Club to show that he was not afraid of being hurt, thus found many business enterprises in which to interest himself and his fortune.

Not all of these enterprises are connected with Wall Street. Biddle, along with social register companions, was accused only a fortnight ago of sharing with Mayor Walker a plot to convert the dismal restaurant which now sits like a spider, webbed with paths, at the centre of Central Park, into a civic banquet hall, thus encouraging patronage and improving the circumstances of the waiters who are employed there by the present lessee, Theatrical Zitell.

An even more spectacular Biddle venture was consummated simultaneously with the Television launching. Always a sportsman, himself a boxer of the first order, Anthony Biddle last week inaugurated a return to the sporting traditions of a hundred years ago by buying, for his personal amusement, an interest in a professional fighter. The fighter was Rene De Vos, Belgian contender for the middleweight championship; sports - writers laughed merrily for days at the notion ot a respectable person engaging in the fight racket and of a decently dressed and wellspoken person undertaking to pat and rub a bloody pugilist between the rounds of a fight.

Such escapades have made Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr. popular but they have not, naturally, made him considered a financial authority. While other sound names-- Charles G. Dawes, Victor C. Bell, Harris Hammond -- were listed on the Jenkins directorate, Wall Street wondered why, if television were now an immediate commercial possibility, General Electric Radio, or some other established power had not helped to back it. There appeared to be, however, a friendly alliance with de Forest of which young Biddle is also chairman.

Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr. of Manhattan etc. is not to be confused with Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Sr. who lives in Philadelphia still, guarding jealously the Biddle fame and fortune, both of which were founded by Nicholas Biddle just after the Revolutionary War. Biddle Sr. was once a better boxer than his son; he allowed his proficiency to lead him to a pursuit which he called Athletic Christianity and which he preached around the world.

It was in 1908, then a clubman much like his son at present, that the older Anthony visited Dr. Floyd Tomkins, a Philadelphia divine, and said "I have seen the Great Light. . . ." He was given a Bible class of three men. Soon he inaugurated his own movement, designed to unite the ideas of Sport and of God. In 1912 he held a formal meeting at his Philadelphia house to organize formally "Athletic Christianity," so that any Bible class in the country could become a Drexel Biddle Bible Class and utilize his scheme for keeping young persons near to the churches.

Nor was this the extent of Biddle Sr.'s enterprises. When a mere youth, he conducted an exhaustive investigation into the condition of the inhabitants of the Madeira Islands. After eight years of preparation, he published a literary work on this topic in which the London Athenaeum, blind to the merits of U. S. enterprise, saw only the "naive conceit of the compiler."

* Anthony Biddle's sister married the brother of Mary L. Duke; after a divorce she remarried Thomas Markoe Robertson, famed architect who has a snake tattooed on his arm.