By 1970, the notion of capturing moving images and transmitting them as real-time, two-way conversation over accessible, easily-manufactured and repaired telephone devices suitable for home and office had been a dream of firms like AT&T for decades. Experiments like the popular Picturephone booths in the Bell Systems Pavillion at the 1964 World’s Fair (featuring an experimental precursor to the Mod II, the Mod I) captured the public imagination of Americans. Films such as director Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) presented routine videophone calls between the Earth and the Moon as the tantalizing promise of a technologically sophisticated future.

Yet the Mod II Picturephone unveiled in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1970 never took off commercially. Official assessments by AT&T and outside observers suggested the ambitious network failed because of cost ($160 a month per unit), or its limited scale (peaking at 453 sets nationwide by 1973), or a failure to properly excite potential customers about the promise of videocalling. In fact, we might more properly label the 1970 Picturephone as a secret success, a technology ahead of its time that instead set the pace for the world five decades hence.

Thanks to technological breakthroughs made by Bell Labs engineers and network planning and marketing principles brainstormed by officials at parent company AT&T, the Mod II Picturephone system would lay the groundwork for widespread videoconferencing decades in the future, even if the device itself never became widespread. Besides resolving technological quandaries of cost reduction — transmitting video over copper telephone wires, cheaper than dedicated coaxial cables — and ease of installation — tying voice transmission into customers’ existing desktop phone receivers -- the picturephone designers recognized the greatest appeal of video-by-telephone: flexibility of use, and a place for consumers to define their own use preferences.

By incorporating a flip camera to enable document sharing — intended for corporate customers to disseminate memoranda on videophone calls — Bell Labs engineers anticipated a world of screen sharing and converting single communication devices into multi-modal transmitters of voice, picture, and video, connected to an easily-accessible commercial network. The Mod II Picturephone anticipated the smartphone that would become so ubiquitous to American life in the early 21st century by consolidating multiple tasks into a single machine plugged into an existing network.

The clients of the initial Picturephone network in 1970 were businessmen — corporate executives of the Pittsburgh industrial giants that fueled the last period of post-World War II American economic prosperity. These firms, including Alcoa and Westinghouse, envisioned connecting far-flung industrial outposts to corporate boardrooms to streamline intra-firm communication and make corporate operations more profitable. Alcoa in 1971 incorporated the Picturephone into its experimental APRIS (Alcoa Picturephone Remote Information System), an internal network that used Picturephones to share data and charts like a modern-day intranet.

Others in Pittsburgh recognized the potential of remote videoconferencing to transform education medicine, the arts, and daily life. University of Pittsburgh educator Dr. Omar Khayyam investigated the Picturephones as tools for connecting research universities to inner city schools. Pittsburgh’s Mercy Hospital was prominently featured in AT&T marketing materials as a site where nurses and doctors could consult with one another remotely via videophone across the length of the facility. The civic leaders who attended the Picturephone unveiling in AT&T’s Pittsburgh auditorium in June of 1970 envisioned a widespread network where daily use of videocalls extended beyond corporate headquarters to homes, public libraries, and civic organizations, with telephoning by picture becoming a new norm within a few years.

AT&T was off by a few decades, but in 2020, in the grip of pandemic, the world found itself embracing more than ever the modern-day successors of the 1970s Picturephone network: software-based applications like Zoom, Hangouts, Skype, and Facetime, installed on computers, tablets, and mobile phones, linking people across vast distances.

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