The Picturephone System: Foreword

DEVOTED TO T H E SCIENTIFIC AND ENGINEERING ASPECTS OF ELECTRICAL COMMUNICATION February 1971 1971, American Telephone and Telegraph The Picturephone® System Foreword The first public demonstration of two-way video telephony took place on April 9, 1930, when representatives of the press were shown a system operating between the Bell Telephone Laboratories building at 463 West Street and A.T.&T. Co. headquarters at 195 Broadway in New York City.* Dr. Herbert E. Ives, then Director of Electro-Optic Research for Bell Laboratories, said of this event, "The latest development to be demonstrated is that of two-way television as an adjunct to the telephone."1 The following day a New York City newspaper reported: "Yesterday we saw a much more highly developed form of television demonstrated by the Bell Telephone Laboratories. It was two-way television. We sat in a booth at No. 195 Broadway and conversed with . . . [a person in another] booth at the Bell Laboratories. . . . Each was visible to the other, there being no telephone mouthpiece to mar the image. The speech was very clear. An inoffensive blue light was shot across the face of the speaker from the camera's eye and picked up * This demonstration of a two-way system had been preceded by a demonstration of a one-way system between New York and Washington, D. C., on April 7, 1927. 219 220 T H E BELL SYSTEM TECHNICAL JOURNAL, FEBRUARY 1971 by other batteries around the booth. And yet this marvelous invention is still in the laboratory stage, according to the Bell engineers."2 The interest in video telephony continued after Dr.