The effort sputtered out in 1973.īut another reason came as a surprise, and it had nothing to do with technology: “It turns out people don’t want to be routinely seen on the telephone,” says Hochheiser. Hoping to build on this momentum, the service was introduced into offices in select markets in 1970, but AT&T was unable to garner a sufficient number of users to make the idea work. Lady Bird Johnson did the inaugural honors, “with the smiling ghost of Alexander Graham Bell looking over her shoulder,” as the Palm Beach Post noted with flourish. Soon after, the company opened Picturephone rooms in New York, Washington and Chicago. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter Streams of visitors could try the devices, while market researchers gauged interest. That moment-or so researchers hoped-arrived in 1964, when AT&T introduced the Picturephone at the World’s Fair in New York City, complete with a promotional cross-country call to Disneyland. “The idea of visual communications was still alive at Bell Labs, but waiting for the right moment technologically, socially, culturally,” says Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. At the time, even if there had been demand for the product, networks lacked the carrying capacity needed to transmit visual calls with desirable resolution. (The company had monopolistic control of the nation’s incipient phone services, giving it primacy in research and development.) But the research could only go so far. After that public debut in 1927, work continued at AT&T’s Bell Labs.
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