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TV History 10: Face-to-Face Television
1927 Illustration, Wagner Magazine, Germany: Women of the year 2000, flying their personal airplanes to meet friends at lunch.
Drinking in midday and smoking as casually as men, both women at the table are distracted by the little video screen in their hands, paying more attention to it than to each other. In one woman’s case, she’s looking in on her child, and on the other’s tiny round screen, a man, a lover in all probability. There’s a lot of fashionable, imaginative conjecture here in one picture, but nearly a century later, minus the aviatrix hats, wouldn’t this be a pretty close 2019 approximation of two young women at lunch, wearing earbuds, using FaceTime on their phones? For almost 90 years this idea looked futuristic. Now, the liberated lifestyles of those modern ladies of leisure and the pocket “mirrors” of their hand-held video screens are commonplace 21st century reality.
TV was always supposed to be two-way, face-to-face communication. The idea of television was born in the wake of the telephone, not radio; the idea of mass broadcasting, one to a million, wasn’t yet dreamed of when the first dense webs of phone wires were formed. The image of the ladies on their picture phones was what most educated people of 1900-1925 expected the television of the future to be like.
Video telephones were a stock prop in science fiction for a long time, surprisingly for almost all of the 20th century. Yet the glowing video screen and the camera pickup tube were accomplished by the early ’30s; why’d it take so long?
Videophone-linked lovers in the future world of 1940. (“High Treason”, UK, 1929)
After all, in Manhattan as early as 1931, you could respond to a written invitation from AT&T to be part of an experimental two-way conversation across town with a friend at one of the city’s other two Bell Telephone television rooms. By 1937, you could do this in Nazi Germany on a much more practical scale, and across much greater distances. Family members in Munich, Hamburg, and Berlin could hold reunions in various public picturephone rooms to make use of intercity video bandwidth originally put in for remote viewing of the Berlin Olympics. Even the USSR would get into the act. None of these experimental television-telephone services, essentially all propaganda showpieces of future tech, survived the war.
The 1939-40 New York World’s Fair was remembered for popularizing superhighways, television, robots, nylon, and the one that didn’t catch on: faxing newspapers overnight nationwide via radio. Twenty-five years later, the 1964-65 World’s Fair was supposed to be the mass market commercial debut of new technologies like space travel, computers, and video telephones, featured at AT&T’s Bell System Pavilion.
When I was 12, I thought they were right around the corner; as it turned out, my future wife and her sister talked to each other over the Bell Picturephones as well. As a further futuristic touch, at random the video booth conversations in New York were extended to the Bell exhibit at Disneyland, creating transcontinental face-to-face talks between strangers. Of course, 55 years ago the only company that could afford AT&T’s exorbitant long distance rates was … AT&T.
From the White House: Lady Bird Johnson calls New York City Mayor Robert Wagner.
The 1964 iteration of the long-awaited vidphone was practical, durable, and well-crafted to fit within the company’s century-old wired network of spoken telephone technology. AT&T was one of the largest, most respected industrial corporations in the world, famous for its long-reaching plans. The anticipated Sixties-Seventies leap to Picturephones was long in the making, with phased investments. Yet it failed, and the failure was so famous that for decades, it became a case study in business schools, as if the lessons of that loss were obvious. “The blind fools spent the money before they bothered to find out if customers wanted it”—that was supposed to be the bottom line.
But that wasn’t really so. Lots of customers said they wanted it, but not at the price point that the phone company could finally reach—$150/month: in 2019 dollars, $1,000, per video phone, per month. People were ready to pay three or four times as much to see who they were talking with, not 30 to 40 times as much. In the bandwidth-starved analog era, that’s the best Ma Bell could do.
Like the Concorde or the Space Shuttle, video telephoning became a development of the late ’60s that worked but for vastly more money than predicted. From this point forward, though, large companies that could afford it started to treat themselves to video conferencing rooms that rivaled the lairs of James Bond villains. That became a narrow, lucrative specialized market that was the videophone’s first real-world success.
By the late ’80s, speculation about interactive and two-way television was coming back into the news. Sony and other companies pioneered a tiny, short-lived market in still image, black and white phones that worked over regular phone lines. Sony Face to Face had a specific need in mind: Japanese men who were separated from their families on long contract projects in foreign countries.
Although my cross-country business travels were usually brief, I carried a Sony transceiver whenever I was away from home. After the American Film Institute’s 25th anniversary of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Uptown Theater in DC, I was probably the only California-based member of the audience who was able, like the film’s fictional Dr. Heywood Floyd, to actually go on a phone afterwards and say hello to my kids, 2,700 miles away.
1993 wasn’t 2001, not quite yet. That same year, the day after Bill Clinton’s inauguration, I visited AT&T’s fabled laboratory in Holmdel, NJ, then one of the nation’s jewels of privately financed research. They were all in on what they saw as the future profit center of the telephone company, sending video to the home, with various new methods called ISDN (individual subscriber digital network) and DSL (digital subscriber line). The UK’s notably un-sentimental business journal The Economist gave it Big Capitalism’s official nod of the head, calling ISDN “The unmistakable sound of money hitting the table: I Smell Dollars Now.” And they were right to. This wasn’t quite broadband to the home yet, but it was only half a step, half a decade away.
Until then, there was a fairly cheap product called Via 8, full-motion videophones that worked over regular phone wires at no extra charge. They were popular with families; we still have ours. You could send motion or detail, not both, but they worked surprisingly well during the turn of the 21st-century twilight of low definition TV and “POTS”—Plain Old Telephone Service.
A year after the World’s Fair closed: The late Sixties take a wrecking ball to the dreams of the early Sixties. But not all of them.
It’s been claimed again and again that there’s no real market for seeing who you’re talking with. Certainly, there’s no need for most phone calls to be made at arm’s length and in flattering light. But there are already a couple of valid, time-proven markets for video telephony (yes, there is such a term): Family Reunions. Business meetings. Staying in touch with a spouse during distant travel. Young people’s vanity. All four uses are reliably not going away anytime soon.
The picture up at the top, of 1927’s ladies of the future: ignoring for the moment the social implications of this lifestyle and what it’s actually meant for relations between the sexes in our century, let’s jump to the really captivating factor here: Realistic product design. The whole thing isn’t in the hand-held screen; it’s assumed that a handbag-sized case with a shoulder strap would hold the battery and most of the electronics. Remember the “bag” or “lunchbox” first-generation cellular phones that were called “Salesman’s specials?” Same idea. Not bad for 1927, a prophecy that finally came true.
Published in General
Sure. But I can’t count the number of lunches, dinners, car rides, walks, and other times spent in company without devices when people were not feeling very talkative or had nothing to say. Other times, what is seen on a phone or heard on a radio becomes a topic of discussion.
Before modern technologies, there was plenty of silence among company.
Whether or not it is rude to turn on the TV or radio, take a phone call, or browse the web among company depends on many things. Did you just arrive? Do you see each other often? Are you looking up something from the conversation? Do y’all need a bit of silence to let emotions settle after a disagreement or awkward moment?
I’m not saying nothing has changed. But the changes might not be as clear or as significant as they seem.
Ah so Nine eleven was a two-fer. The Saudi Binladen group let us see how much they really hated America, and also made us warier than ever of air travel. Wonder if their business upticked soon after the event…
It’s one of those things that I suspect never made the PictureTel quarterly report to stockholders…
When telephones were new, there was some question of whether it was permissible to answer a ringing phone if someone was already in the room with you. After all, that person outranks a mere ringing bell. But on the other hand, ages before caller ID or answering machines, how would you ever know who just tried to reach you?
When video phones and conferencing were new, there was a tendency to treat them like five-and-dime show business–“I’m on television!”–before we settled into a different illusion, that the person on the phone is more or less physically present.
There’s a degree of sad, dark near-comedy about seeing the film clip of JFK making the first touch tone phone call. The final four digits of the number are “1964”. Sorry, Jack, that none of us could see the future.
Not exactly video telephone conversation, but in the mid-1960’s my father taught in what today we would call a distance learning experiment run by the University of Florida in which the professor would lecture from a studio and the students would be in several classrooms scattered around the state. The system included one way video (professor in studio to classrooms, but no classroom to studio video), and two way audio (so students could talk to professor, asking questions, etc.). The university would have preferred two way video, but the [analog] infrastructure of the day could not handle the required bandwidth. The same limitation hobbled my father’s attempt to set up a distance learning system in southern California in about 1970. Without two way video, professors balked at the idea that they couldn’t see who was watching them from the remote classrooms. Professors particularly wanted to see if a dean or other administrator was in the remote classroom.
In the early 1990’s my then-employer tried to make devices that would compress video images so that it would be possible to efficiently transmit video over analog telephone lines, but was never able to get enough compression to achieve the desired results.
I mentioned distance learning in a TV History post about PBS last fall. Public television didn’t start out as America’s Official White Guilt Network, but as a way for State U’s Doc Brown to lecture to bigger and more classrooms.
Two-way TV does change things. In our modern Skype era I spoke to a classroom in Vilnius, Lithuania and given the way the camera faced the class, I could see where the tougher part of the lecture began to cause fidgeting.
The president of the University of Houston got sacked for trying to use television for distance learning. He set up KUHT-TV (the nation’s first public TV station) back in 1952 as a way to cut costs. He thought using the station to broadcast for-credit classes could save construction costs for buildings to house lecture halls for the equivalent number of students as could be reached by educational broadcasts.
Alas for him, the board of regents had an edifice complex and were annoyed because they could not expand the school with new buildings. They fired him, canned most of the for-credit broadcast classes, and built classroom buildings.
I’m pretty sure I saw the BellLabs set up at Disneyland. Scared the daylights out of me! But I loved the futuristic stuff there–just fascinating. Thanks, Gary!
I heard recently that Facebook in Pittsburgh was working seriously on “social teleportation”, the goal being to create a remote imitation of a person’s presence so real that it was virtually impossible with normal human senses to tell if the person was actually in the room or not. The person from whom I heard this is quite involved with new business and technical developments.
Asimov’s The Naked Sun.
From 1943.
Videoconferencing was so bad, I refused to use it after several disastrous experiences but about 3 years before retiring we had a telepresence room installed in our building. It was simply amazing, the closest thing to actually being with other people truly enabling interaction – and I did calls both in the US and with China and India. It was the first time I felt something like this could actually be a productive tool as opposed to a gimmick in the workplace.
home run
I’ve got three books on the subject, and each one is now something of a museum piece of obsolete technology.
Odd one out is “Electronic Meetings”, 1979, by the “Institute for the Future”. It describes several methods–online typing; speakerphone; and videophone–and lays out the costs, advantages and disadvantages of each. It’s written in a corny, scenario-bound way, like a War Games exercise, assisting an imaginary African country and having to navigate the imaginary personalities. I do admit that too many tech books are written without much regard for how the thing will actually be used. Disadvantages of video included: massive cost; far-from-universal infrastructure; a tendency to play to the camera.
“The Video Telephone”, 1974, Edward M. Dickson and Raymond Bowers, is the mother lode. It assumes that near-future equipment will basically be Bell Picturephones with some performance upgrades, and carefully works out in dollars and timetables what effect they might have on society–less business travel, less fuel used, a big deal right after the October 1973–March 1974 gas crisis–and predicts they’ll also be used for home banking and video games. The only real undesirable, to them, is social stratification–most will not be able to afford them for some time to come. The book is less a script for a revolution that didn’t quite happen, and more a partial look at home computing in the broadband age, then about 25 years ahead.
“Visual Telephony”, 1999, has the advantage of describing reality. They get down into the nuts and bolts of how it’s done, and ironically, this 1999 specificity makes the book as dated as the two that are far older. But it gets into uses like tele-medicine, and was probably a good starter plan for big companies that hadn’t yet taken the plunge into video conferencing.
1957. GE built this 3D stereoscopic color camera for the Atomic Energy Commission to act as an early form of telepresence in dangerously radioactive environments.
C’mon, Jon, how about a post? Your comments are always so informed and we’ve bantered back and forth on these history threads without most of the membership being able to see it. Why not grab the stage, man?
The one thing that FaceTime and other internet-based video sharing has done is lower the bar on what is acceptable for broadcast. Stuff (well, not “stuff” but another descriptor that begins with “s”) that we would have rejected as being unairable 30 years ago is now standard operating practice.
The idea that we would put poorly lit, poorly mic’ed and poorly transmitted Skype video as an acceptable source of field production stills baffles me.
Same here. 30 years ago when I was in the newz biz, I would have complained long and loud if anyone came back to the news room with that kind of crappy video. (And frequently did.)
Ditto with cell phones and the crappy reception you get. Once upon a time companies prided themselves on the clarity of phone calls. (Think of Sprint’s pin-drop ad campaign.) Now they’ve pretty much given up on clarity as a selling point. Because nobody cares. And it shows.
Today Mr Flubber would be shot down for violating the hallow sacred patch of airspace emanating over our “leaders”.
Some pigs deserve more security than other pigs.
Bob Gale, who wrote “Back to the Future”, was on the ACF board. He was also a fan of “The Absent Minded Professor”. I told him we shared a fondness for small town-based science fiction comedies with flying cars.
That was a movie that never needed a remake.
Don’t forget Ricochet meetups.
Those may look like aviator goggles, but given the prescience of the rest of it maybe they’re VR headsets.
Very informative post, Gary.
BTW, this was written and published in 1909, the year my father was born.
That’s a great quote, Django. Where’s it from?
The first practical design for television was Paul von Nipkow’s scanning disk, generally dated at 1884. The theory worked; the chemistry didn’t, as the one photoelectric substance known at the time, selenium, had a faint signal and there was no method of amplifying it until the 1910s. Boris Rosing in Russia knew that a cathode ray tube could be made to display a picture, but the Nipkow disc was still the only hope of a camera, and it was still unworkable. The guy who I consider the inventor of electronic television was the UK’s A.A. Campbell-Swinton and the date was 1911. His plan laid it all out, years before Farnsworth or Zworykin–both of whom, it must be said, finally made their designs come to life in the late Twenties. And by then, in the mid-Twenties, John Logie Baird accomplished what the previous forty years hadn’t–he made the Nipkow disc work. For a brief few years, it was the world standard for television.
Being the a$$hole I sometimes can be, I intentionally left out the reference just to see if someone would ask. As someone once said, “Ask and ye shall receive.” https://www.ele.uri.edu/faculty/vetter/Other-stuff/The-Machine-Stops.pdf
It’s from a story by E. M. Forster called The Machine Stops. I found it almost fifty years ago. Most people at that time were reading 1984 or Brave New World when they wanted to read dystopian novels. I was off exploring Forster and Yevgeny Zamyatin.
So ya got We, huh? Me too. There’s supposed to be a silent film version, but I haven’t seen it; perhaps @thereticulator could fill us in.
Yes, I read it, but the only futuristic stories that really stuck with me were Coming Attraction by Fritz Leiber and The Stars My Destination by A. E. Bester.
Fantastic. Thank you, Gary.