Videophones, the early days

The ubiquitous telephone is in just about every home these days, in fact many homes contain several as well as numerous mobile telephones in the pockets of the children as well as the adults. The days when we used to have to walk half a mile to a foul smelling telephone box, put in four pennies and press button B. seems a whole world away! In those far-off days we never even dreamt of being able to actually see the person that we were talking to, but technology has come a long way since then. Two-way video is a fairly easy system to set up, with both callers having a videophone which contains a video camera and display, as well as a receiving microphone, and the Speaker. The data can be sent over the telephone wires via a modem and compression technology is used to reduce the necessary bandwidth. Video conferencing systems are now commonplace and they allow quite large groups of people in different locations to communicate visually as well as audibly at the same time, with each participant able to see all of the other delegates, or perhaps just one, the display being controlled by a conference organiser.

Although two-way speech over the telephone has been routine for several decades the idea of being able to see the person you are speaking to over a video link used to belong to the realms of science fiction, and yet the technology has actually been available since before the Second World War. A one-way system was demonstrated as far back as April 1927 in a conversation between Secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover, and senior officials of AT&T. A few years later in 1930 a two-way video link was set up between the headquarters in New York of Bell laboratories and AT&T using the then latest TV equipment within a closed circuit, but by 1956 Bell laboratories had a videophone system which would work over the telephone system. There is a world of difference however between an experimental system looked after by a whole army of technicians in white coats, and a fully robust system which is ready to sell to the general public; engineers from Bell have such a system ready by 1971, and they christened it Picturephone.   next ..........

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