The videophone as a concept began to materialize shortly after the telephone was patented in 1876, and its history is closely connected to that of the telephone. Many attempts were made to create a practical video-telephone, and were met with repeated commercial failure because of high cost, lack of popular demand and a failure to reach the threshold for the network effect to apply. Videotelephony finally reached the mainstream in the 2000s with the subsumption of videotelephony into modern multifunction smartphones and videoconferencing apps which have made videotelephony ubiquitous at the same time as eliminating the videophone as a distinct product category.
Early history
Barely two years after the telephone was first patented in the United States in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell, an early concept of a combined videophone and wide-screen television called a telephonoscope was conceptualized in the popular periodicals of the day. It was also mentioned in various early science fiction works such as Le Vingtième siècle. La vie électrique (The 20th century. The electrical life) and other works written by Albert Robida, and was also sketched in various cartoons by George du Maurier as a fictional invention of Thomas Edison. One such sketch was published on December 9, 1878, in Punch magazine. The term "telectroscope" was also used in 1878 by French writer and publisher Louis Figuier, to popularize an invention wrongly interpreted as real and incorrectly ascribed to Dr. Bell, possibly after his Volta Laboratory discreetly deposited a sealed container of a Graphophone phonograph at the Smithsonian Institution for safekeeping. Written under the pseudonym "Electrician", one article earlier claimed that "an eminent scientist" had invented a device whereby objects or people anywhere in the world "....could be seen anywhere by anybody". The device, among other functions, would allow merchants to transmit pictures of their wares to their customers, and the contents of museum collections to be made available to scholars in distant cities...." In the era prior to the advent of broadcasting, electrical "seeing" devices were conceived as adjuncts to the telephone, thus creating the concept of a videophone. Fraudulent reports of "amazing" advances in video telephones would be publicized as early as 1880 and would recur every few years, such as the episode of "Dr. Sylvestre" of Paris who claimed in 1902 to have invented a powerful (and inexpensive) video telephone, termed a "spectograph", the intellectual property rights he believed were worth $5,000,000. After reviewing his claim Dr. Bell denounced the supposed invention as a "fairy tale", and publicly commented on the charlatans promoting bogus inventions for financial gain or self-promotion. However Dr. Alexander Graham Bell personally thought that videotelephony was achievable even though his contributions to its advancement were incidental. In April 1891, Dr. Bell actually did record conceptual notes on an "electrical radiophone", which discussed the possibility of "seeing by electricity" using devices that employed tellurium or selenium imaging components. Bell wrote, decades prior to the invention of the image dissector:
Should it be found ... [that the image sensor] is illuminated, then an apparatus might be constructed in which each piece of selenium is a mere speck, like the head of a small pin, the smaller the better. The darkened selenium should be placed in a cup-like receiver which can fit over the eye ... Then, when the first selenium speck is presented to an illuminated object, it may be possible that the eye in the darkened receiver, should perceive, not merely light, but an image of the object ... Bell went on to later predict that: "...the day would come when the man at the telephone would be able to see the distant person to whom he was speaking." The discoveries in physics, chemistry and materials science underlying video technology would not be in place until the mid-1920s, first being utilized in electromechanical television. More practical "all-electronic" video and television would not emerge until 1939, but would then suffer several more years of delays before gaining popularity due to the onset and effects of World War II.
The compound term "videophone" slowly entered into general usage after 1950, although "video telephone" likely entered the lexicon earlier after video was coined in 1935. Prior to that time there appeared to be no standard terms for "video telephone", with expressions such as "sight-sound television system", "visual radio" and nearly 20 others (in English) being used to describe the marriage of telegraph, telephone, television and radio technologies employed in early experiments. Among the technological precursors to the videophone were telegraphic image transmitters created by several companies, such as the wirephoto used by Western Union, and the teleostereograph developed by AT&T's Bell Labs, which were forerunners of today's fax (facsimile) machines. Such early image transmitters were themselves based on previous work by Ernest Hummel and others in the 19th century. By 1927 AT&T had created its earliest electromechanical television-videophone called the ikonophone (from Greek: "image-sound"), which operated at 18 frames per second and occupied half a room full of equipment cabinets. An early U.S. test in 1927 had their then-Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover address an audience in New York City from Washington, D.C.; although the audio portion was two-way, the video portion was one-way with only those in New York being able to see Hoover.
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