Popcorn Atlas

People · 2026-08-26

Charles T. Manley

  • Perfected an electric popcorn machine in Kansas City in 1925 and sold it to movie theater operators, a cabinet built to run on a carpeted lobby floor where gas poppers were unwelcome.
  • Received U.S. Patent 2,232,954, "Corn popping apparatus," filed 20 October 1939 and granted 25 February 1941, assigned to Burch Manufacturing Company, which put a hood, a duct on the kettle lid, and a blower on the machine so seasoning fumes stopped clouding the display glass.
  • Changed the operating name to Manley on 18 September 1940 by Missouri filing, announced in Boxoffice on 4 January 1941, and finished the company's run of Kansas City addresses at 1920 Wyandotte Street on the edge of Film Row.

An engineer out of Butte

Almost the entire private life sits on one family page. Charles T. Manley was born in Butte, Montana, to Irish parents. He came through the First World War, went back to the oil fields as an electrical engineer, and married Violet Grimwood, Scottish and English, of San Francisco. They met in that city, settled in Kansas City, and raised four children named Charles, Jim, Patricia, and Don.

The pages retrieved for this entry carry no birth date and no birth year. They name no service branch, no oil company, and no year the family left Montana or California. A birth year that cannot be sourced stays off the page.

The far end of the life is documented, because the patent office required it. U.S. Patent 2,536,298 was filed on 10 April 1948 and granted on 2 January 1951. The grant reads "Charles T. Manley, deceased, late of Kansas City, Mo., by Violet G. Manley, executrix." He died between those two dates. The day is not in the record retrieved here.

The rest of the file is industrial. Machines, street addresses, corporate filings, and two patents about grease.

Burch, a split, and a name he kept

Around 1922 Julian R. Burch began building popcorn machines in Kansas City under the name Burch Manufacturing Company. The family history says Manley joined him roughly six months later and the two formed the Burch Manufacturing and Sales Company. They separated inside a year. Burch left for St. Louis and started Star Manufacturing Company. Manley kept the Kansas City shop, and he kept the Burch name for nearly two decades.

The founding dates scatter. The Burch collector site hedges between 1921 and 1922. A later Cantrell International profile dates the shop to 1923. Star's own corporate histories put its St. Louis beginning at 1921 or 1923. Those numbers cannot all be right. The sequence the sources do agree on runs this way: a Kansas City popper shop around 1922, Manley in within months, a split inside the year, Burch gone to St. Louis.

Missouri filings show how long the older name lasted on paper. The state table, as the collector site prints it, gives Manley, Inc. a creation date of 15 April 1924 and lists two previous names, Burch Manufacturing and Sales Co. and Burch Manufacturing Company. A Burch Manufacturing Company filing dated 18 September 1940 names Charles T. Manley as registered agent, and Manley, Inc. records from the 1950s treat that September date as the operating name change. Boxoffice of 4 January 1941 announced the new name on the popcorn machine line along with new models. Supplies kept shipping under the Burch name for a while afterward.

He ran a company called Burch for most of his working life. His own name reached the cabinet late.

The 1925 machine

Charles Cretors had already electrified the trade's other end. Cretors licensed a steam peanut roaster onto a Chicago sidewalk in 1885 and held U.S. Patent 506,207, granted 10 October 1893, for a roaster that stirred kernels in seasoning. In 1907 he and his son Hazael patented, in the company's telling, a conversion of the steam equipment to an electric motor. The Cretors history page says the firm began putting electrical power into its machines in the 1910s and that those machines became theater fixtures in the 1920s. That is a company claim, and it frames what Manley did rather than erasing it.

Manley's contribution carries a year and a city. Popcorn had been selling from wagons outside theaters, the family history says, owners worked out that the money could be theirs, and in 1925 Manley, "an inventor from Butte, Montana," perfected an electric popcorn machine and began selling it to movie theater operators. Encyclopedia.com repeats the year and the mechanism. "In 1925, Charles T. Manley perfected his electric popcorn machine, and popcorn vendors moved inside the theater where the trapped sounds and smells of popping corn often made more money than the feature film."

Perfected is the verb both pages choose. No 1925 patent grant turned up in the search for this entry. What the sources describe is a product decision. A glass fronted case, electric heat instead of gas or steam, a kettle a house could run in its own foyer. Gas carried a reputation for fire and fumes. Electric heat let the cabinet stand on carpet and hold the smell where the ticket buyers stood.

Carpets, class, and a closed door

Kansas City had no shortage of popcorn in 1925. What it lacked was popcorn inside the picture palaces.

Andrew F. Smith, whose Popped Culture is the standard history, told Smithsonian in 2013 why the door stayed shut. "Movie theaters wanted nothing to do with popcorn, because they were trying to duplicate what was done in real theaters." The palaces had carpets and rugs they did not want corn ground into. Some hung signs. Some ran coat check rooms that asked patrons to leave the bag with the coat. Before 1927 the films were silent, and crunching carried in a room that still borrowed its manners from live performance.

Money rewrote the etiquette. Owners who wanted a cut leased lobby privileges for about a dollar a day, often on a strip of sidewalk rather than in the foyer. By the middle 1930s they were cutting out the vendor and buying a machine. Smith's example, as Smithsonian reprints it, is a Dallas chain that installed poppers in 80 houses and kept them out of its five best theaters. Two years later the 80 were making more money and the five were in the red. HISTORY.com adds R. J. McKenna, who claimed nearly $200,000 in popcorn sales in 1938 while his chain lost money on tickets.

Julia May Braden worked the same fight in the same city from behind a counter, running stands at Kansas City houses through those years. Asked who first sold a box of popcorn inside a cinema, Smith answers that the question cannot be settled from the record.

Wyandotte Street and Film Row

The address chronology, built by the Burch collector site from advertisements, sales contracts, and machine identification tags, reads like a growth curve. Burch Sales Co. at 919 Baltimore Avenue in 1923. 1432 Wyandotte through the late 1920s and early 1930s. 1906-08 Wyandotte by 1931. Manley, Inc. at 1906 Wyandotte in the early 1940s. Then 1920 Wyandotte in the late 1940s, in a building the firm bought around the end of the Second World War.

That corner, the northwest corner of 19th Terrace and Wyandotte, sits two blocks east of Broadway in what is now the Crossroads Arts District. The family page says the 1910 building was renovated in 1998 as the Popcorn Lofts. It stood at the edge of Kansas City's Film Row, four square blocks between 17th and 19th Streets where distributors kept fireproofed vaults for nitrate prints from the 1920s into the 1960s. Clio's entry on the district notes that those buildings "even housed the Manley Popcorn Company." The popper plant stood beside the offices that booked the houses buying poppers. The family history points to Suzanne King's December 1999 interview with Charles Manley Jr. in the Kansas City Business Journal for that connection, a text this entry did not retrieve.

The Kansas City Star of 25 November 1928, as the family page cites it, described Burch Manufacturing as a maker of electric popcorn machines and named Charles T. Manley as president and principal owner. Three years past the 1925 date, the hometown paper already treated the electric cabinet as his line.

The cabinet as a patent problem

The two grants in his name describe what an indoor theater popper had to survive.

U.S. Patent 2,232,954 covers a cabinet with a display compartment, a hood, and a kettle on trunnions. Heated seasoning oil throws fumes and grease that discolor the glass and, in the inventor's words, impair "the sales appeal of the popcorn to be dispensed." A duct on the kettle lid and a blower in the hood pull the fumes out. The specification suggests putting that exhaust to work, using it "to fill balloons and/or to animate streamers or advertising devices." The smell is merchandise, and it has to be handled so the glass stays clear.

U.S. Patent 2,536,298, "Corn popping apparatus and ventilator therefor," improves on the first. The assignee is now Manley, Inc. Oil vapors condense on cabinet walls and on the fan itself, and the greasy coating "destroys the efficiency of the apparatus" while collecting "dirt, bacteria and the like." The fix is a removable Venturi tube. A blower jet induces flow from the kettle and the cabinet at once, and the tube lifts out, goes into hot water, and goes back in. The claims read like a description of the customer: glass cabinet, tilting kettle, agitator, a hood full of motors.

By 1939 the Kansas City shop had stopped arguing about whether popcorn belonged in a lobby. It was arguing about grease on the glass.

War, market share, and an estate patent

During the Second World War, the family history says, Manley took popcorn overseas on a government contract to build machines that made treats for American servicemen. Encyclopedia.com describes the same movement, popcorn "taken overseas as a treat for American servicemen" and picked up by other countries. Sugar rationing thinned the candy competition at home. Smith, speaking to KCUR, put it plainly: there were no restrictions on popcorn. Popcorn.org says Americans ate three times as much as usual. By 1945, following Smith, more than half the popcorn eaten in the United States was eaten in theaters. A 1949 survey cited by HISTORY.com found 86 percent of American theaters selling it, with six in ten patrons buying.

The collector site states that Manley held 70 percent of the movie theater machine market in 1947. That figure belongs to the site, not to an audited census. The documents underwrite something narrower and still substantial. By the late 1940s Manley was a named national supplier of the lobby cabinet, with a Film Row plant and a patent file about display glass.

He did not live to sign the next decade's product line. The April 1948 application is his last public document as an inventor, and the January 1951 grant is an estate paper carrying Violet's signature. By the 1950s, the family history says, the company sold a full line of snack food processing equipment. Cantrell International, a division of A.C. Horn, bought that division in 1993. The Missouri table dissolves Manley, Inc. on 22 May 1990.

Kansas City keeps the residue. KCUR, reporting in January 2025, found the Manley sign still on the 1910 building at 1920 Wyandotte, a Manley cabinet on the floor of the Mainstreet Theatre, and Manley Inc. records dated 1922 to 2012 at the State Historical Society of Missouri. In Marion, Ohio, the Wyandot Popcorn Museum keeps Burch and Manley machines on its floor, among them a restored 1932 Burch World's Fair Model No. 5.

Sources