The screen in the futuristic Bell System pavilion at the 1964 New York World’s Fair flickered into life. On it appeared the moving, talking, black-and-white image of the nation’s first lady, Lady Bird Johnson, beamed from Washington DC more than 300 kilometres away.
This was Picturephone, the world’s first commercial video-calling service. For the American Telephone and Telegraph Company – the monopoly better known as the Bell System that provided most US telephone services – Picturephone was the keystone of a massive expansion. Limited in what it was allowed to charge for existing services, the company planned to use expected demand for the new technology to justify higher prices. It would then use the profits to build a futuristic network of underground microwave communications pipes across the nation.
In the event, it was an epic failure. Picturephone lasted only a few years, and the microwave pipes never saw the light of day. By the time the project was canned, it had cost Bell the equivalent of billions of dollars in today’s money. Only with the advent of the internet decades later did transmitting even static images over the conventional telephone network become routine. But Skype calls and video streaming have become common only over the past decade. What happened?
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Picturephone was by no means the first stab at transmitting pictures over the telephone network. As early as 1927, Bell’s research arm, Bell Labs, was demonstrating a blurry, monochrome video call between future US president Herbert Hoover in Washington DC and Bell president Walter Gifford in New York. It tapped into the zeitgeist. Fritz Lang included a large-screen videophone in his 1927 film Metropolis, as did Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, released in 1936. In Nazi Germany, public videophone booths used banks of vacuum-tube equipment to between 1936 and 1940, although they didn’t see much use.
The surge in television broadcasting in the late 1940s renewed Bell’s interest in video calls. Radar and electronics had helped win the second world war, and US technology companies boomed as they retooled their factories to produce civilian products. By the mid-1950s, about 60 per cent of US households had televisions – almost as many as had telephones. Television sets had supplanted radio receivers as the main source of home entertainment, and it seemed natural that video phones would soon also replace audio phones. Bell did not intend to be left behind.
But a gulf separated audio and video technologies. Telephones were electromechanical devices, with their switches, speakers and microphones powered by low voltages delivered over dedicated copper wires. To convert broadcast signals into moving pictures, televisions required large and power-hungry vacuum tubes, fed with mains electricity. That was just the receivers: the cameras used for recording were bulky and expensive devices suitable only for studio use.
Pipe dream
The solution lay in Bell’s own labs. The transistor, announced by the company in 1948, promised electronic circuits far more compact and efficient than those built with vacuum tubes or valves – and with them smaller, more reliable cameras and displays. “Only then did video telephone service seem possible as an economic venture,” wrote D. N. Carson of Bell Labs in 1968.
Bell announced Picturephone in 1956, but one video call took the bandwidth of 100 voice calls, and the requirement that the new system shouldn’t undermine the reliability of the existing telephone service meant the plans took years to develop. The setup at the 1964 World’s Fair included a small black-and-white display, a video camera similar to those used on early space missions and a loudspeaker. This video unit was controlled by a separate telephone with an array of push-buttons replacing the then-conventional dial. Special voice-only extension phones were available so secretaries could recognise the distinctive ring of a Picturephone call and alert their bosses to answer it.
Not that the call would have come particularly far. The copper wires of the Bell System carried only a limited range of audio frequencies, from 300 to 3400 hertz. That was enough to make human speech intelligible over long distances, but the bandwidth demand of a Picturephone call meant it tended to degrade after only about 10 kilometres.
The new digitised transmission systems of the time offered some scope for easing both this problem and the capacity bottleneck, as did nascent microwave technology. Bell had spent $40 million in the early 1950s installing 107 microwave towers spaced 50 kilometres apart to carry long-distance telephone traffic across the US. This system could handle thousands of voice calls simultaneously, but still only tens of Picturephone calls. A more radical solution was needed if Bell were to provide the cross-country service vital for the businesses it expected would be its prime customers.
Bell’s grand plan was to turn to very high microwave frequencies, around 60 gigahertz. Oxygen in the air blocked those frequencies, so the signals would be sent through five-centimetre-diameter metal pipes filled with nitrogen and buried underground. As money flowed in from the new system’s success, these “pipes of progress”, as their advocates called them, would be built across the US. Each would carry some 230,000 voice conversations simultaneously – or 2300 Picturephone calls.
Some were captivated by the idea. The writer Arthur C. Clarke was “entranced” by Picturephone, says electrical engineer , who joined Bell Labs in 1961 and who for a time had a Picturephone on his desk. A large-screen, full-colour version , based on Clarke’s book.
At the World’s Fair, though, most visitors just walked past the seven Picturephone booths. Some people were selected at random to test the devices for 10 minutes – although it’s unclear who they called. Public Picturephone booths set up at Grand Central Terminal in New York, the National Geographic Society building in Washington DC and the Prudential Building in Chicago attracted even less interest: only 71 patrons made calls in the first six months.
Some problems were obvious, such as making sure two participants would be in booths in different cities at the same time. Presumably, that had to be arranged by telephone beforehand. And then there was the cost of making a call: $16 to $27 a minute, depending on the distance.
Undeterred, Bell modified the system ahead of its commercial introduction, doubling the screen size to about 13 by 14 centimetres, about half the size of a typical household television set at that time. Responding to what the company called “a frequent concern of housewives”, engineers added a “Disable” button to shut off the video if users didn’t want to be seen, and another button so they could check their appearance before a call. One further feature, an option to display information from a mainframe computer, was strangely prescient – although only 300 characters, roughly 50 words, would fit on the screen.
Bell began its commercial Picturephone service on 30 June 1970 in downtown Pittsburgh, with 38 sets installed at eight companies. A front-pageNew York Times story called the event “a major stride in the development of communications”. The plan was to expand the service to Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia and Washington DC within a year. Bell hoped to have 100,000 Picturephones in service by 1975 and a million by 1980.
When another New York Times reporter went to Pittsburgh in mid-1971, however, he found only 33 Picturephones in operation, with just 12 able to dial outside their own buildings. Aside from impracticalities such as cost, it seemed that, against all predictions, no one actually wanted video calling. Users were more interested in seeing graphics than face-to-face video conversation. At Bell Labs, Lucky recalls that the only person who called his Picturephone was his boss, Arno Penzias. “I found it very awkward because I had to stare at him,” he says.
“It’s just as well no one wanted Picturephone, as the technology never worked anyway”
Perhaps it’s just as well no one wanted Picturephone, because the proposed solution for the transmission problems never really worked anyway. Field trials showed that the microwave pipes were not only ruinously expensive to install, but they also needed to be die-straight. A pipe with even the gentle curve of a railway track was enough to scramble the signals, and even the earth pressing on the buried tubes was sufficient to cause distortion.
In 1972, Bell stopped making Picturephones and ditched a plan for a marketing drive in Chicago. But it still wasn’t until 1973 that the company started to investigate who might need two-way video communications – and it had a hard time finding anyone.
And so Picturephone slowly faded away. Bell never released the total bill for the project, but it has been estimated at $500 million – equivalent to several billion dollars today.
It wasn’t a total loss, however. The project spurred development of digital telephone networks, a technology that helped launch the public internet. And, in his speech accepting the 2009 Nobel prize in physics, laureate George E. Smith credited Bell Labs’s quest for a silicon camera to use in Picturephone as an inspiration for his invention of the charged-coupled devices now used to create images in digital cameras.
Video calls and videoconferencing are made possible today thanks to a technology in its infancy in the early 1970s: low-loss optical fibres. A hair-thin optical fibre can carry 500 times more data than Bell’s microwave pipes could have, even if they had worked.
By and large, though, it’s not video conversations we are flooding those fibres with, but the latest Netflix release or cute cat videos. Video calling remains a baby brother to voice calling. And there are few signs of change. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and FBI director James Comey are among those recently outed as taping over the webcams on their laptops for fear of spying. It seems that, as Bell learned with Picturephone, when it comes to making and taking calls, we’d still rather be heard and not seen.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Heard, but not seen”
