The concept of the video call is much older than it seems. You have to go back to the 19th century (late 1870s) to find its earliest roots, when it was conceptualized in the United States and Europe as a future possibility. But nearly sixty years had to pass before the first public video call service appeared.
The Picturephone's Public Debut
It was in 1964 when AT&T presented the Picturephone at the World's Fair, an advanced development that required fifteen years of work and a multimillion-dollar investment. The video below shows the second generation of the Picturephone, introduced commercially in Pittsburgh in 1970.
A 1927 Demonstration
One of the first technical demos of the videophone took place in 1927, when Herbert Hoover, then Secretary of Commerce of the United States, made a video call to AT&T officials, covering the distance between New York and Washington D.C. That was just one of AT&T's video call prototypes, and it led to decades of research and development, seeking ways to simplify the system and eventually create a commercially viable version.
The Hinge Moment
The hinge moment for AT&T came with the Picturephone, presented at the World's Fair and Disneyland, two places where visitors could make free video calls and experience what it was like to talk on the phone and see the other person's face at the same time. The Model 1 Picturephone arrived in the form of public booths connecting three cities: Chicago, New York, and Washington D.C. Six years later, the second generation of the Picturephone was presented in Pittsburgh, as shown in the video above.
A Costly Failure
Despite the spectacular technological advance that the Picturephone represented, it was a commercial failure for AT&T. After fifteen years of development (officially) and an investment of 500 million dollars (that number doubles if you take into account all the development of previous decades, and in the 80s), it was impossible for AT&T to recover that figure.
The price ranged between 16 and 27 dollars for a three-minute public video call (between 118 and 200 dollars adjusted for inflation), while the monthly subscription for those who wanted to contract the service was 160 dollars (about 947 dollars today) for a package with a minimum of thirty minutes. By 1975, AT&T expected about a hundred thousand Picturephones on the national network, but only five were installed in Pittsburgh, adding a few hundred in the rest of the country. Definitely, a device and service ahead of its time.
