Picturephone

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
by Jon Gertner
Published 15 Mar 2012

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. Without question, the Picturephones were diverting. In several obvious respects, the device was less a radical innovation than an elegant melding of the established technologies of television and telephone. But it wasn’t entirely clear whether the Picturephone actually solved a problem. Some Bell Labs engineers worried about this.

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But a majority said they perceived a need for Picturephones in their business, and a near majority said they perceived a need for Picturephones in their home. Would they pay for it? Here, the results were less clear. For a price of between $40 and $60 a month, for instance, only 12 percent of the couples interviewed said they would want a Picturephone in their homes. Business customers, however, seemed more amenable. Even if the cost were substantially higher—$60 to $80 a month—29 percent said they would be interested in having the device at their place of business. When the AT&T market researchers asked Picturephone users whether it was important to see the person they were speaking to during a conversation, a vast majority said it was either “very important” or “important.”

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It may prove useless because of its functional shortcomings, or because it’s too expensive in relation to its modest appeal, or because it arrives in the marketplace too early or too late. Or because of all those reasons combined. The Picturephone was a mistake in judgment. The Picturephone began on a high note of optimism. “We have now received a clear go-ahead from AT&T on the Picturephone program we proposed,” Julius Molnar, Bell Labs’ executive vice president, informed the staff in late summer of 1966.30 The actual Picturephone technology was being upgraded and redesigned; instead of the egg-shaped futuristic device that had made a splash at the World’s Fair, Molnar told the staff, the set would be a “Model 2,” or Mod 2, as it was called at Bell Labs, a squarish device, designed by a renowned industrial designer, that was both more elegant and more functional.

What Technology Wants
by Kevin Kelly
Published 14 Jul 2010

One artist sketched out a fantasy of it in 1878, only two years after the telephone was patented. A series of working prototypes were demoed by the German post office in 1938. Commercial versions, called Picturephones, were installed in public phone booths on the streets in New York City after the 1964 World’s Fair, but AT&T canceled the product ten years later due to lack of interest. At its peak the Picturephone had only 500 or so paid subscribers, even though nearly everyone recognized the vision. One could argue that rather than being inevitable progress, this was an invention battling its own inevitable bypass.

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While our daughter watched us on her screen in China, we chatted leisurely about unimportant family matters. Our picture phone was exactly what everyone imagined it to be, except in three significant ways: the device was not exactly a phone, it was our iMac and her laptop; the call was free (via Skype, not AT&T); and despite being perfectly useable, and free, picture-phoning has not become common—even for us. So unlike the earlier futuristic vision, the inevitable picture phone has not become the standard modern way of communicating. First Glimpse of the Picture Phone. From Bell Telephone’s pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. So was the picture phone inevitable?

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slums of New Yorker New York Times New York World’s Fair (1964) New Zealand Niebuhr, Reinhold Niepce, Nicephore Nobel, Alfred Nonzero (Wright) Norman, Donald North America North Korea nuclear power Nye, David octopuses Ogburn, William oil opportunity “Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere” (James and Ellington) Osborn, Henry Out of Control (Kelly) oxcarts oxygen Pace, Norman Paleolithic rhythm paper Paradox of Choice, The (Schwartz) parasitism Paris 1900 Great Exposition in slums of patents Perrow, Charles Petrequin, Pierre phonograph photography processing of satellite physics, laws of picture phones Picturephones pixels plagues Planet of Slums (Davis) plants chlorophyll of domestication of gathering of insectivorous intelligence of Plato Poincare, Henri Poisson distribution, statistical Ponnamperuma, Cyril Popper, Karl population growth food production for of Sapiens of hunter-gatherers Malthusian limits of negative negative, future scenarios of world see also fertility rates Postman, Neil Precautionary Principle predator rhythm Priceline Priestley, Joseph printing Proactionary Principle Process Theology progress critical views of emotional unease produced by energy production in environmental costs of evolutionary historical change vs.

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic
by Bill Gates
Published 2 May 2022

* * * — In 1964, Bell Telephone exhibited the first-ever video phone at the World’s Fair. The Picturephone looked like something from The Jetsons, with a small live image embedded in a futuristic-looking oval tube. I was eight years old at the time. I saw pictures of the phone in the newspaper and couldn’t believe that what I was looking at was possible. Little did I know that, decades later, I’d spend hours of my day on video calls. Virtual meetings have come a long way since this early prototype of Bell Telephone’s Picturephone in 1964. It’s easy to see technology as mundane when it’s just part of our day-to-day life.

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A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A adjuvants, 157, 220 Africa birth and death records, 57–58, 59 child mortality, 202, 202–3 COVID in, 3, 58, 116 “COVID-19 Awareness Program,” Zambia, 176–77, 177 Ebola epidemic (2014–16), 56 health gap, 199, 200 Integrated Disease Surveillance and Response system, 55 life expectancy, 200 LumiraDx machines in, 64, 114 medical oxygen supply in, 121 vaccine manufacturing in, 169, 170 See also South Africa; specific countries African Medical Supplies Platform, 64 dexamethasone distribution, 114 LumiraDx machine distribution, 64, 114 airborne transmission of pathogens aerosols, 102–3 breath and, 102 conditions affecting, 103 of COVID, 4, 102, 103 droplets, 102–3 good ventilation and, 100–103 See also masks/mask mandates Allen, Paul, 231 anthrax, 193, 194, 195 antibodies, 115–16, 134–35, 251 Asia child mortality, 202, 202–3, 204 internet availability, 92 pathogen genome sequencing labs, 226 polio and, 49 See also specific countries Aspen Pharmacare, 166 AstraZeneca, 155, 166 Australia backward contact tracing, 100 COVID management, 25 COVID testing, 64, 224 COVID transmission anecdote, 101 innovation, genetics of pathogens, 77 avian flu, 188, 188n B Balochistan Youth Against Corona, 31 Banda, Sister Astridah, 176–77, 177 Bangladesh, masking in, 109–10 Barcelona Institute for Global Health, 59 Bedford, Trevor, 72, 76 Bell Telephone’s Picturephone, 248–49, 249 “Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen, The” (Rosling, TED talk), 204, 204n Bharat Biotech, 169 Biden, Joe, 35 Biological E. 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Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Published 28 Feb 2008

The predicted end point of this process was a progressive disassociation of social life from real space, leading to the death of cities as the population spread out to more bucolic spots. The assumption that communications tools are (or will someday be) a good substitute for travel assumes that people mainly gather together for utilitarian reasons of sharing information. Companies have been selling us this idea since the invention of the telegraph, and AT&T’s famous Picturephone, first launched at the 1964 World’s Fair, was pitched as a way to reduce the need for travel. This reduction did not happen, not in 1964 or ever. If communication were a substitute for travel, then the effects would have shown up by now, but they haven’t. In 1978 President Carter deregulated the airlines, causing travel prices to fall, but telecommunications stocks didn’t collapse; they rose.

Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
by John Brockman
Published 19 Feb 2019

In a sense, computers have already taken over, facilitating virtually every aspect of our lives—from banking, travel, and utilities to the most intimate personal communication. I can see and talk to my grandson in New York for free. I remember when I first saw the 1968 movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, the audience laughed at the absurdly cheap cost of a picturephone call from space: $1.70, at a time when a long-distance call within the U.S. was $3 per minute. However, the convenience and power of computers is also something of a Faustian bargain, for it comes with a loss of control. Computers prevent us from doing things we want. Try getting on a flight if you arrive at the airport and the airline computer systems are down, as happened not so long ago to British Airways at Heathrow.

The Wisdom of Crowds
by James Surowiecki
Published 1 Jan 2004

It’s a familiar truism that governments can’t, and therefore shouldn’t try to, “pick winners.” But the truth is that no system seems all that good at picking winners in advance. After all, tens of thousands of new products are introduced every year, and only a small fraction ever become successes. The steam-powered car, the picturephone, the Edsel, the Betamax, pen computing: companies place huge bets on losers all the time. What makes a system successful is its ability to recognize losers and kill them quickly. Or, rather, what makes a system successful is its ability to generate lots of losers and then to recognize them as such and kill them off.

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
by Edward Slingerland
Published 31 May 2021

Why Skype Didn’t Eliminate Business Travel In 1889 Jules Verne predicted that the “phonotelephote”—essentially a dedicated videoconferencing device that he imagined would become commonplace by the year 2889 (!)—would make business travel obsolete.34 We didn’t have to wait a thousand years. Videoconferencing became a real technology in 1968 with AT&T’s “Picturephone.” The advent of Skype and other videoconferencing technologies in the mid-2000s brought phonotelephotes into every home that had access to a decent internet connection. Each new advance in remote teleconferencing capacity is accompanied by renewed predictions of the demise of business travel. Yet the fact is that, at least until the global Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, business travel has done nothing but steadily increase.

The Ransomware Hunting Team: A Band of Misfits' Improbable Crusade to Save the World From Cybercrime
by Renee Dudley and Daniel Golden
Published 24 Oct 2022

In 2017, Sarah, Fabian, and Michael began playing virtual party games on a simulated tabletop on Sunday nights. “I was the reason it started,” Sarah said. “I wanted people to play with.” They enjoyed irreverent, fun games like Cards Against Humanity, in which players are asked a question and choose crude or politically incorrect answers from an array of cards; Broken Picturephone, akin to Pictionary except that participants make up phrases as well as drawings; and Secret Hitler, in which players divide into liberals and fascists in the Reichstag circa 1933. The objective for the fascists is to elect Hitler chancellor, and for the liberals to identify and assassinate him.

The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World
by John Dickie
Published 3 Aug 2020

Held in Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens over two April-to-October seasons in 1964 and 1965, it attracted 51.6 million people–equivalent to more than a quarter of the American population. Visitors could watch the first colour TV at the RCA Pavilion. Or ride a gleaming new model called the Mustang at the Ford pavilion. Bell Telephones brought their ‘Picturephone’. Formica built a World’s Fair House on the site: this seven-room home made every conceivable use of plastic, including wipe-clean walls inside and out. Sweets were factory-made before spectators’ eyes in the Chunky Candy Corporation Pavilion. Walt Disney’s ‘Audio-Animatronics’–talking robots–amazed all comers when they were deployed in several pavilions.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 14 Sep 2020

.”*2 A week later a TV series set one hundred years in the future, The Jetsons, premiered in prime time, and three months after that the president spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony for the U.S. pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, which he said would show the world “what America is going to be in the future.” And so it did. My most vivid memory of my tenth year was a trip to Chicago, my first to a big city, and the afternoon we spent at the Museum of Science and Industry, where I had a long-distance Picturephone conversation with a stranger at the Bell System’s World’s Fair pavilion in New York City. General Motors’ fair pavilion was called Futurama. General Electric’s, called Progressland, had been designed by the Disney Company, and Walt was at that moment dreaming up his masterwork in Florida, the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow, EPCOT.