Every day, around 50 million people a day stare at and speak to each other on computer or mobile device screens across the great expanse of the Internet via Skype, Apple's FaceTime, Google Hangouts or some other video conferencing software.
This voluminous amount of video phoning would have made 19th and 20th century futurists smile and shake their heads, marveling at both how remarkably right and horribly wrong their visual telephone predictions would turn out.
It was 50 years ago, on April 20, 1964, and during the subsequent months of the World's Fair at Flushing Meadow Park across from the brand-spanking-new Shea Stadium in Queens, New York, that Mr. and Mrs. America got their first chance to make a video telephone call on Bell's Mod I (Model I) Picturephone. Fair-goers had to wait on line at the Bell Telephone exhibit at the northeast tip of the Fair to hold a 10-minute visual talk with a complete stranger at a similar Picturephone exhibit at Disneyland in California.
According to Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation:
[A] visitor who wanted to try a Picturephone would enter one of seven booths and sit before what was called a "picture unit." The device was a long oval tube, measuring about one foot wide and seven inches high and about a foot in depth. Set within the oval face was a small camera and a rectangular video screen, measuring four and three-eighths inches by five and three-quarter inches. The picture unit was cabled to a touch-tone telephone handset with a line of buttons to control the screen. If you wanted to make a Picturephone call at the fair — or more precisely, if you wanted to talk with the Picturephone users at other booths — you simply pressed a button marked "V" for video; after that you could either talk through the handset or through a speakerphone on the picture unit.
In fact, according to the official A History of Engineering & Science in the Bell System — Transmission Technology prepared by members of the technical staff of AT&T's Bell Labs and edited by E.F. O'Neill, there were only six, not seven, Picturephone booths at the World's Fair.
Regardless of the number of booths, video chatters viewed a vertical black-and-white 30-frame-per-second image, but had to stay perfectly motionless within a 16 x 21-inch frame to stay in view at the other end. A single button push could disconnect the video connection at either end.
Two months later, on June 24, AT&T's commercial Picturephone service began, kicked off by a phone call from First Lady Lady Bird Johnson from the nation's capital to a Picturephone booth at Grand Central Station in New York. Additional booths were available at the National Geographic headquarters in Washington and in Chicago at the Prudential Insurance building and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. You had to make advanced reservations, and both parties had to show up on time at their designated Picturephone locations for the chance to chat.
While the Picturephone experience was cool, it was also costly. At $16 for three minutes, your up-to-15-minute video call could cost as much as $80 — the equivalent of $610 in 2014 dollars.
Despite its cost, the Picturephone concept was so compelling that Stanley Kubrick, via 2001: A Space Odyssey, predicted that not only would there be a Howard Johnson's on a space station, but an AT&T Picturephone call from orbit would cost just $1.70 for a minute and a half.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the videophone future AT&T executives and engineers imagined: It didn't happen, at least not the way they thought it would. For the next 30 years, despite failure after failure, AT&T and several other companies trod out Picturephone-inspired devices and expensive service, demonstrating Einstein's definition of insanity of repeating the same actions and expecting a different result.
The pursuit of the videophone actually began long before Bell debuted its first working Mod I units at the World's Fair in Queens. From nearly the moment Alexander Graham Bell called for Mr. Watson, scientists and dreamers dreamed of an ubiquitous video-call future.
A year after Bell patented his phone, someone calling themselves "Electrician" speculated about a combination fax machine/videophone called an "electroscope" in a letter to the editor to the New York Sun.
A year later, French science writer Louis Figuier postulated Bell was working on a "telectroscope" videophone device.
In December 1878, French writer and cartoonist George du Maurier, speculated in print and drawing in Punch magazine that Thomas Edison was working on a "telephonoscope" videophone.
And in a June 5, 1880, issue of Scientific American, inventor George Carey proposed a telephone system of "seeing by electricity."
But it took 30 years for AT&T to turn these science fictions into science fact. On April 7, 1927, then commerce secretary Herbert Hoover spoke from a Washington, D.C., video booth to a Bell Lab videophone in New York.
In 2004's On the Persistence if Lackluster Demand — the History of the Video Telephone, authors Steve Schnaars and Cliff Wymbs described this primitive, not-ready-for-prime-time videophone as:
... a hopeless monstrosity that took up half a room. It had two large screens — a small screen that provided excellent picture quality but was too small to see and a larger screen that offered little more than a crude silhouette. Technically speaking, the screen flashed 18 frames per second, fast enough to seem animated.
It took 30 more years for AT&T to develop a more sophisticated and workable videophone. At the Aug. 23, 1956, meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers, AT&T demonstrated a one-frame-every-two-seconds videophone system. With most of the major problems solved, the company started work on what became the Mod I Picturephone in October 1959.
AT&T simply assumed everyone would want to video chat, so forged ahead, again, again and again.
If at first you don't succeed...
Predictably in hindsight, Picturephone service didn't take off in any of its variations. On February 5, 1969, AT&T started selling the Mod II — which offered a 251-line, 30fps black & white image displayed on a 5 x 5.5-inch screen — to corporate clients. But by mid-1971, once again faced with spectacular Picturephone apathy, AT&T ended the service.
Schnaars and Wymbs reported that between 1966 and 1973, AT&T spent half a billion dollars on Picturephone R&D with nothing to show for it. AT&T's corporate historian, Sheldon Hochheiser, called the videophone "the most famous failure in the history of the Bell system."
Dumbly undaunted, AT&T tried again in July 1982, launching its ridiculously expensive corporate Picturephone Meeting Service. A one-hour video conference call between New York and LA could cost $2,380, on top of a company having to spend $117,500 to buy or $17,760 to lease the equipment. After a year or so, AT&T was shocked — shocked — that this version of video calling didn't take off, either. Again.
At the same time, several Japanese companies, predominantly Mitsubishi and Sony, tried to succeed in the consumer videophone market where AT&T failed, and suffered the same consequences.
Then, in January 1992, AT&T unbelievably and almost laughably tried beating the dead Picturephone horse again. This time, its VideoPhone 2500 had a small flip-up LCD screen with a color picture that one critic compared to "the film from the bank when they tape bank robbers." VideoPhone 2500's initial $1,500 price tag was soon cut to $1,000, then to $30 overnight rentals. After a of couple years, AT&T finally gave up Picturephone for good.
AT&T's 2001 post mortem, reported by Schnaars and Wymbs, reasoned that (emphasis added):
Picturephone was still too big, expensive, and uncomfortably intrusive and people did not want to be seen on the telephone... To be successful, AT&T hypothesized that it needed to have improvements in speed, resolution, miniaturization, ease of use, price performance and incorporation into a desktop piece of equipment.
Right and spectacularly wrong.
Back to the future
The Picturephone problem — and those experienced by latter-day video call systems such as the Vialta Beamer, telyHD, C-Phone, 8x8's ViaTV and others — wasn't the desire (or not) to see who you were talking to, but the need to buy not one, but two dedicated pieces of equipment — one for you and one for someone else so you could call them.
What changed the equation, of course, was the Internet and the ubiquity of devices — laptops, smartphones — with webcams built in. Since we already had the devices, all we needed was software: Skype, ironically introduced in August 2003, just months before Schnaars's and Wymbs's analysis, followed by Apple's FaceTime in mid-2010.
Once we had the devices and the software, which we didn't have to buy separately and especially just for video calling, it's become obvious that we did want to be seen on the telephone.
And somewhere, the 19th century futurists and Picturephone engineers are likely puzzled but somehow satisfied that their vision of a videophone future has been finally realized, even if they got a big part of it wrong: that the phone itself wasn't really needed at all.
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