Can you hear me? Can you see my screen? Let’s talk about how the hell we ended up here.
As with most things now, It all starts with fake news.
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone, to the awe of everyone in
the world. People anywhere could now talk to anyone about mustache care or how much of a
racist jerk Rutherford B Hayes was. However, it didn't take long for everyone to ask for more.
Because if you can send a voice over a wire, why couldn’t it send a photo of your mustache?
Barely two years later, in 1878, a french writer named Louis Figuier
heard a rumor that Alexander Graham Bell was developing something called a "photophone." Now
If Louis would have done some research, he would have learned Graham Bell and team were actually
working on a system to transmit audio telephone calls over wire by light, a precursor to modern
fiber-optics. Instead, he published a story that Alexander Graham Bell had developed an invention
called a Telectroscope, a device which would allow calling with pictures, which he claimed
would lead to merchants transmitting pictures of their wares to customers,
the contents of all the world’s museums to be made available to anyone anywhere,
and operas and plays to be viewed at home. Even if it wasn’t a real thing, the excitement
around the Telectroscope spread like wild fire, quickly winding up in science fiction
writers books and comics. By the early 20th century,
leaps and bounds were being made into the research for picture phones and unsurprisingly, nowhere
made more strides in than that the company that originated from Graham Bell himself, AT&T’s Bells
Labs in New Jersey. In 1927, they held the first American demonstration of television, a one way
broadcast of the live picture and audio of Hebert Hoover, the Secretary of Commerce at the time,
as he gave a speech in New York to a group of politicians and journalists in DC.
The only catch was no one could talk back, the picture phone was
a one way street, so what Bell Labs had on their hands was more of a television..
The true invention of which they were of course beaten to by Philo Farnsworth, who
in 1927 also made his first broadcast, and by
1930 had cracked the code, a working television receiver device that could be used in homes.
Bell Labs continued to hack away, being convinced that a television, and even video
conferencing were just the start. They thought of themselves less of a phone company and more of a
services company and If they could expand their audio communications business to video,
there was no limit to the kinds of information they could broadcast into people’s homes.
They too could see the interconnected world to come could be a huge business.
And at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City, Bell's technology called Picturephone finally made
its public debut. The Picturephone was a 5” black and white screen (which is pretty much the same
size as a modern smartphone), with a camera. After waiting several hours in line, a person
in Queens got the privilege to sit and talk to another person who also waited in line for
several hours in Disneyland in California… I assume about how long their wait was.
To promote the service, Picturephones were installed in booths in public locations
in New York City, Chicago, and Washington DC. People could make reservations to talk to a friend
at any other location for the outrageous price or $16 for 3 minutes (that’s about $130 in
modern money for 3 minutes). Unsurprisingly at that price, Picturephone booths never caught
on and were closed four years later with literally only 71 people having used them.
The technology was still major news, and video calls started to be a regular
element in science fiction. Like Star Trek, 2001: a space odyssey, and The Jetsons.
In 1970, AT&T thought they had cracked it, offering Picturephone installations in home
and offices for the price of $160 per month for 30 minutes of talk talk time(that’s about $1000
in modern money… per month for 30 minute of talk time). They were positive it would be a success,
but by the mid 70s, only 500 devices were operating and in 1978,
after spending a half a billion dollars, at&t abandoned the project completely.
Throughout the 1980’s, several other competitors would try making video conferencing work, but it
was always more expensive and harder to use. One version cost a quarter of a million dollars for
just the device and $1,000 a hour for call time. In 1992, after nearly a century of trying, at&t
finally sort of got it, releasing The Videophone 2500 – I’m not sure what 2500 stood for,
probably the amount of times they had tried to a video phone work. The device itself cost $1499,
and because the color video was transmit over a regular phone line,
it didn’t cost the user anything extra to make calls. It was successful-ish , selling
30,000 Units before being discontinued 3 years later.
Meanwhile, the dream of those working on video calling, that way to send endless
information through wires fully developed independently from them with the World Wide Web.
And ironically it was this technology, the world wide web, that paved the way for August 2003,
when a truly consumer based cheap widely adopted video calling solution was released called Skype.
And Skype begot iChat video which begot FaceTime which begot Google Hangouts,
which begot Zoom which begot Microsoft Teams… and here we are… still in a world wide Pandemic,
with some of us potentially trapped in these little video chat boxes forever….
Ps At&t would finally
get into the television and movie business when they bought Time Warner in 2018, only to change
its minds and spin it all off into a separate company nearly 3 years later… Good job, at&t!