© Mark Ollig
During the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, NY, a demonstration took place ahead of its time.
An AT&T Bell System telephone representative demonstrated its advanced “see-as-you-talk” Picturephone to the many curious spectators gathered around it.
The demonstration included a video camera, a television screen, a Touch-Tone push-button telephone, audio speakers, and a power supply.
The Picturephone video camera used a small, Plumbicon cathode-ray tube commonly found in commercial television broadcasting cameras of that time.
The Picturephone unit itself measures about 12 inches wide, 7 inches tall, and 13 inches deep. The television screen measured 4-inches-by-5-inches.
April 20, 1964, using a Picturephone installed at the fair in New York, and one at Disneyland in California, people located in both venues were able to see and talk with each other.
The people using it appeared to delight in seeing the person they spoke with over a futuristic video telephone usually seen on “The Jetsons” Saturday morning cartoon TV show.
In the demonstration, the real-time audio and black-and-white video quality on the Picturephone call was of high-quality.
Long lines of people were in both locations; folks wanted to get a good look at the future video telephone.
“We can’t hope to provide Picturephone service for the ordinary residence and business office in the near future, but we are hopeful of offering the service in the next few months on a market trial basis,” said Charles Maples, assistant chief engineer at AT&T.
In June 1964, AT&T installed Picturephone public calling booths in New York City, Chicago, and Washington, DC.
A person wishing to use the Picturephone calling booth needed to schedule an appointment 15 minutes in advance, as did the person they would be talking to on a Picturephone in one of the other cities.
It cost $16 to place a 3-minute Picturephone video call from New York to Washington, DC; $21 between Chicago and Washington, DC; and $27 between Chicago and New York.
Remember, folks; this was in 1964, so that $16 would be equivalent to approximately $135 in today’s economy, $27 would equal almost $225.
In 1964, the cost of placing a local phone call using a coin-operated payphone was 10 cents.
Minneapolis Star newspaper authored an article June 25, 1964, about the Picturephone, titled “See-and-Talk Phone Service Is Inaugurated.”
St. Cloud Times newspaper ran an article Oct. 9, 1964, on the Picturephone, entitled “Bell System Puts Phoners on TV.”
With the low number of people using the Picturephone, the folks at AT&T needed to come up with a way to entice more folks to utilize them.
In 1965, AT&T decided to cut the cost of placing a 3-minute Picturephone call by about 50 percent.
This new pricing strategy proved unsuccessful in attracting more Picturephone users.
The next idea was to move the outdoor Picturephone video booths inside Bell-owned buildings to see if this would increase their usage.
This action did not help. People still did not show much interest in the Picturephone.
Since using a Picturephone was restricted to just three cities, it did not acquire enough national exposure from the public to make the service a profitable venture for AT&T.
It was expensive, and the people having to make a video call from a location other than their home or business place found it too inconvenient.
Many of the Picturephone booths installed were no longer in use by 1968.
By the early 1970s, AT&T admitted the public was not showing enough interest in the Picturephone, causing its loss of appeal.
At its peak, AT&T reported there were around 500 Picturephone subscribers.
While the Picturephone technology used was state-of-the-art and demonstrated how we would communicate with each other in the future, having one installed in a business or a home proved too costly for most people.
Today, many of us working from home commonly use video conferencing applications; you could call it a Picturephone, and, of course, its cost is not a limiting factor.
Eleven years ago, over my internet dialup account via a modem, I used the Skype video conferencing program to communicate with my oldest son, attending Academia de Bella Arte in Florence, Italy.
Today, I regularly use Microsoft Teams Meeting and the Zoom video conferencing programs.
A photograph of two people using the Picturephone taken April 20, 1964, can be seen at https://bit.ly/34syIcY.
Stay safe out there.
