Today video chatting is an integral part of most of our lives as business, family and friends spread themselves ever wider around the world. For many including myself such communication enabling services including Skype, Messenger, Whatsapp, Google chat, Viber and more are no longer considered mere luxuries, but necessities for social survival. But while such platforms are our current preferred tools for audio-visual communication, these companies certainly didn’t invent the genre.
To look at the birth of video conferencing we need to go back over 90 years and the very start of television. Just as with the invention of the telephone and gramophone before-hand, the dream of television was as much about finding a more complete source of communication as it was about entertainment for the masses. Therefore, the first TV demonstrations during the mid-1920s were not showcasing dancing girls and literary plays, but the very grainy faces of real people just talking to each other via a screen.
First experiments……
Although John Logie Baird in the UK is credited with being the first to demonstrate a working Television system in January 1926, it was the Americans who should really be credited with the formal birth of video conferencing. Under the technical expertise of AT&T the first US demonstration of TV took place in April 1927 and being American, would be a far more interactive and grander experience than anything which had come before. Adapting the Baird system but adding a microphone, AT&T succeeded in hooking up three groups of invited industry guests who were waiting eagerly 200 miles apart in New York, Washington and New Jersey. It is noted that during the first experiment which took place via a dedicated cable to Washington, the President of AT&T Walter Gifford had a live conversation with the Secretary of Commerce (later President) Herbert Hoover with the onlookers hearing the conversation via a loud-speaker and viewing it via two specially created screens. The first was a small screen of the size used by Baird that was intended for the individual and measured merely 2 x 2.5 inches (or the size of a book of postage stamps). The second screen for the onlookers to see measured 2 foot x 2 foot 6 inches (equivalent to a modern 31 inch screen).
Following this first conversation to Washington, the group assembled in NY were then re-connected via wireless to an AT&T station in Whippany New Jersey 30 miles away where the experiment was repeated. According to those assembled, these two back to back conferences were met with some success and while the images on the big screen were hard to discern, those on the small screen were much clearer and was compared to viewing an old faded daguerreotype photograph. Though the bigger 31-inch screen is considered small by today’s standards, at the time it was the largest TV screen that had ever been attempted and it’s failure showed the engineers that TV would not be competing with cinema’s big screen experience any time soon. Indeed AT&T were keen to point out these tests overall had soaked up over 1000 staff so were in no way commercially viable.
As a response to the American success, in February 1928 John Logie Baird back in England made the first successful transatlantic Television wireless broadcast (3500 miles) between London and New York by borrowing a powerful transmitter from a local amateur. Here a Mrs Howe became the first woman to be televised across the atlantic. This test was then repeated a month later by using equipment on board the Cunard liner Berengaria 1500 miles out to sea. Once again, Baird’s experiments were hailed as a ‘measured success’ with fading and atmospherics being the biggest problems mentioned.
A problem of Logistics…….
So, if these preliminary experiments into video conferencing by the US and UK had been even a partial success back in the 1920s, why did it take another 70 years for the technology to really take hold? The answer lay not in the theory but in the technicalities.
Although video conferencing is in principle little more than a telephone and a TV, the two elements required a very different set of solutions and wave lengths. The early TV experiments showed that the existing telephone cables could not simply be used as the television signals faded out and distorted far too quickly. Furthermore, by the 1920s the powerful telephone companies were already complaining that their existing telephone systems were already near breaking point, so the idea of adding any new video data to the same lines was just not viable. When it came to sending the signals via wireless, this of course was the preferred option. Here again the early national and transatlantic tests proved just how susceptible to atmospheric conditions the radiowave transmissions really were and the equipment was still not powerful enough to transmit the massive amounts of data needed to create a smooth live feed. Therefore when communication is the primary aim, an indistinct image which is out of sync with the audio is really not much use to anyone. This issue of maintaining a clear steady picture was one that would confront the emerging TV industry for many years to come and even when home TVs really began to take off after WW2, the biggest headache for any owner remained the need to constantly retune the set.
Of course, further tests and small-scale adoption of video-conferencing continued to be tried out in the 1930s both in Germany and the US, each of which were good for publicity but little else. These attempts usually relied on dedicated special cables laid over set distances and payed lip-service to the video element rather than relying on it. After the Second World War AT&T picked up their research once again and produced the first commercial videophone in 1959. Although this was showcased to much acclaim at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, it too could only display one frame every two seconds making it more of a novelty slide show than something you could lip read from. Even so, within a few months of the fair AT&T had bravely launched their first Picturephone rooms in NY, Washington and Chicago where people could go to video talk with each other. This was a positive start, but in truth as a service it remained both inconvenient and expensive.
The Bell Telephone Pavilion at the 1964 NY World’s Fair
The balance is finally tipped……..
Although more and more dedicated video conferencing services emerged as the 20th Century wore on each refining elements in turn, overall progress in the field remained painfully slow and steady. Then finally, nearly 80 years since the first attempts, the balance was finally tipped. Combining the digital data transfer speeds (which were now possible with the birth of the internet in the 1990s) with the emergence of camera-enabled smartphones in 2009, all of a sudden we the public were handed a pocket device which could allow us to video chat for free. And we were all finally connected to each other.
Photo attribution: Business Video Conference by WolfVision GmbH ; All 1920s TV test photos from Alfred Dinsdale’s 1932 ‘First Principles of Television’ Book; 1964 World’s Fair Photo by Sam Howzit ; Smartphone group by pntxvr