The $2,000 FaceTime Box From 1987
I am inside the VisiTel, 1987’s future of video telecommunication. For the first time, Mitsubishi’s Visual Telephone Display meant an affordable videophone so that you could see who was on the other end of your RJ-11 cable – and they could see you. The only problem is that the Visitel videophone doesn’t send video and you can’t use your phone while it’s working.
Now your Grandma Myrtle accidentally FaceTimes you for free because her Werther’s Originals-greased fingers push the wrong button – but the dream of video communication is older than you think, was more expensive than you can imagine, and caused the most innovative company on the planet to flush half a billion dollars down the toilet. But the biggest surprise of all is built into our own evolution: despite spending millions of years developing our visual systems so we can instantly and expertly process facial expressions and body language, despite our never ending commitment to mastering all the complexities of reading human appearance – it turns out we may be better off not seeing each other at all. And while video conferencing is ubiquitous now, from remote Zoom-ing and Google Meet-ing for work to live, high-quality multi-user video calls on iOS, Android, WhatsApp, Discord… the thing is… almost nobody wanted this.
I grabbed the March 1988 issue of Popular Science because I saw that it featured a cover story about the dawn of consumer-friendly video phones – here now under $400! And they used your existing phone lines without a premium charge. William J. Hawkins heralded the arrival of Mitsubishi’s VisiTel, and he anticipated a wave of similar devices from Sony, Sharp, and all the other major electronics brands. And the potential for the devices included augmenting the shopping experience out of paper catalogs, having your real estate broker show you pictures of a house you’re interested in, making sign language viable for phone calls – and no more blind dates.
FINALLY. And Hawkins also predicted that video phones could be hooked up to peripherals like printers that could make hard copies of the images, or sending clips from home movies you’d recorded on your camcorder. He actually got… a lot of that right. So I grabbed a pair of brand new, never opened VisiTels off eBay – obviously you need TWO of these things to work, or one person is just sending pictures of their face out into the ether. The box is… oddly hideous, it’s covered with the Mitsubishi logo,
but it looks like you’re about to talk to Max Headroom with chicken pox. And there’s these brown splatters? I have no idea how these brown splatters even happened. I do not want to know how these brown splatters even happened. The unit itself is actually really cool, it doesn’t look a lot different from the newest gen of Amazon’s Echo Show – the VisiTel has a 4 ½ inch black and white CRT screen with a 96 x 96 pixel display resolution and 32 levels of grayscale – so obviously, no color photos. The embedded camera is a 16mm fixed lens with a 15” to 25” depth of field, and there are 8 brightness control settings.
The back has an RJ-11 jack to hook it up to your phone line, and… that’s it. In an era of shockingly complex devices, the VisiTel LU-500 was pretty efficient and extremely user-friendly. To turn it on you just slide open the lens cover of the camera and it displays a video image of you, ready for the other VisiTel user to see. So you just give Grandma a call and you see her brand new dentures, right? Wrong.
Here’s what happens instead, I’ll just connect these VisiTels to each other to test them out. Hitting the “Send” button takes a freeze frame photo and sends that over the standard telephone wire. And during that whole time, you can’t talk AND you can’t hear the other person. The receiving VisiTel unit then rebuilds and mirrors the image properly for your friend, family member, co-worker, or blind date. The problem with sending video over telephone lines is simple actually: it’s the bandwidth.
A phone line at the time carried about 3.5 kilohertz, so 3,500 pieces of information could be sent per second. To put that into perspective, TV required 4.5 million at the time. When you press and hold the “Send” button, the VisiTel breaks down the 96x96 black and white image into data representing picture information and then holds it in Dynamic Random-Access Memory – and then the pixels from memory are read sequentially and used to control the amplitude or volume of a modulated audio signal with a 1,747-hertz tone. Sending an image sounded like this. The varying amplitude of the incoming signal
is converted to a digital grayscale for each pixel and is sequentially stored in the DRAM. So, it builds the picture over time. Data from the DRAM are read out, converted to an analog grayscale and displayed on the end user’s screen, and the VisiTel can store 3 of those images in its memory as long as the unit remains powered on.
But what about phone lines and connections that suck? They actually factored that into the technology. Huge variances in phone-line quality were mitigated by what’s called a “preamble” – a tone burst was sent to the receiving phone just ahead of the picture so it knows the photo transmission is coming. The whole start-to-finish transmission and display process takes 5.5 seconds, which was a major improvement over Sony’s unit taking 10 seconds. And that’s for black and white – Mitsubishi said color images in future models would take 20 seconds.
Okay, so both of these units both test fine – I should be able to make a VisiTelephone call. I’m going to try by giving one of these VisiTels to producer Matt Tabor. I’ll teleport to 1988, and show him my brand new copy of Mario 2. This was revolutionary technology in the late 80’s, but the promise of talking to video screens started all the way back in the 70’s.
The 1870’s. The December 9th, 1878 issue of Punch Magazine printed a George du Maurier illustration of Thomas Edison’s “Telephonoscope” – a vision of a future device that could transmit light as well as sound. The image is an unbelievably prescient artifact depicting an exciting, vibrant future of instant visual telecommunication over unfathomable distances, right? NO. The immediate reaction is to think the drawing is an enthusiastic, forward-thinking glimpse into the future of technology – and actually, a very smart one. That’s an example of presentism, which is essentially interpreting past events and evidence through modern attitudes and values. We like it now, so they must’ve wanted it then! But this entire illustration was part joke and part scathing critique.
It suggests that Edison was a crazy inventor who worshiped an overly-enthusiastic, techno-utopian future, and it mocks the exaggerated potential of what a device like a Telephonoscope would actually do for us. What the comic actually depicts is “Discovery Mania.” Ivy Roberts described the phenomenon in “Visions of Electric Media: Television in the Victorian and Machine Ages” – the people reading Punch in 1878 weren’t anything like us. We look back and assume that everyone was thrilled with a burst of world-improving technologies like electricity and photography, but back then… there was a deep strain of cynicism that saw these inventions as goofy at best and ruinous at worst. It went beyond the economic concerns of the Luddites – it was really about whether we were changing our lives for the worse as an emerging class of technocrats promised us salvation. The “Telephonoscope” comic wasn’t a techno-fantasy for a future video phone, it was satire making fun of the very concept.
And it stayed that way for a while. The 1936 Charlie Chaplin film “Modern Times” spoofs industrial society – it shows the president of the Electro Steel Corp. using a large video phone to oversee and direct his employees. At the end of the scene, The Tramp sabotages the phone by cranking on a bunch of levers and wheels. And 9 years before, Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film “Metropolis” depicted a future of industrialists high in skyscrapers using video phones to communicate with the overworked subterranean masses. It was a grim, depressing vision of the future.
But what Fritz Lang didn’t realize was at exactly the same time as “Metropolis” was delighting millions and earning a spot in every future film student’s course of study, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover – who 2 years later would be the 31st President of the United States – successfully tested a video phone prototype to both send and receive video with AT&T President Walter Gifford in New York City. As Lang and Chaplin were sounding alarm bells through art, the future was already happening – and the videophone’s “moment” was meant to be the 1964 New York World’s Fair. A Bell Labs executive named Julius Molnar had supported the development of a consumer videophone technology that could be in every home – he predicted that the “Picturephone will be the primary mode by which people will be communicating with one another." Picturephone booths were set up at the AT&T Bell System Pavilion. Bell was on its way to sinking half a billion dollars trying to usher in the video phone revolution, and they could finally showcase it on the world’s biggest stage – they even had a song for the Picturephone called the “Ballad for the Fair:” You have to listen to this. In a place where electronic wonders abound A marriage of sight to the drama of sound A wonderful coupling of vision and speech And a ride to the future and the past within reach It was all legitimately INCREDIBLE – and It all went really, really badly.
Which is weird, because Bell Labs is probably the most important, innovative company of the 20th century – it’s impossible to capture Bell Labs’ influence on the modern world. Telephones and transistors, vacuum tubes, long-distance calling, transatlantic cables, radar, lasers, binary code systems, photovoltaic cells, charged-couple devices, ten Nobel Prizes. You’re watching this video on a smartphone on your toilet because of Bell Labs. They pushed the limits of technology at all levels, government and household, and they knew how to create the future better than anyone. The problem was… did anyone want their telephone to show them in their underwear? More than 25 years before he served as Project Lead on the “Where In The World is Carmen Sandiego?” kids show, Howard Blumenthal actually used the Picturephone at the World’s Fair. He recalled that his junior high crush Maria wasn’t crazy about having
to get dressed up to talk on the phone, and that his parents agreed with Maria. When Blumenthal wrote about the Mitsubishi VisiTel, he said it had two problems: not enough people had them, and they were too expensive. But Bell Labs, Blumenthal, and everyone else dancing on the cutting edge of technology got it wrong. Maria was the one who got it right – and maybe more than she realized. A 2021 study from Carnegie Mellon concluded that video conferencing actually REDUCES collective intelligence. But videophones can’t make you dumber if you don’t want to be seen at all. In “The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation,” Jon Gertner detailed the market research Bell conducted at the World’s Fair.
The majority of the 700 people surveyed said that seeing the person they were talking to was “very important,” so that was encouraging – but what about being the one on display? The beauty of the telephone isn’t just that it connects two people in real-time – it’s that they can both connect comfortably. They can sit on a couch or chair in any casual position, unshowered, wearing old clothes, in a messy house, flipping through a magazine or watching TV as they talk – and the other person doesn’t know. There’s a beautiful layer of anonymity to a phone call, or a text message, that allows for mutual consent with communication. When it comes to video,
all of that gets way tougher: two people need to be totally comfortable both seeing and being seen to make it work, and if there’s any kind of mismatch, the whole process breaks down. Maria could’ve saved Bell Labs at least $400 million dollars. A. Michael Noll worked for Bell Labs in the 1960’s researching human communication
– he was also suspicious. He said in a 1988 interview that, “Using the telephone is ‘akin to whispering in the ear. Seeing somebody almost destroys the intimacy of the communication. When we ask an audience whether they want to see on the phone, half or more say no.” There were good reasons not to want video, and there were great reasons to stick to audio. So… Let’s talk about how to burn billions of dollars. Howard Blumenthal was right about the consumer cost being prohibitive, and Bell Labs was about to find out. Just 12% of those surveyed at the World’s Fair said
they’d pay between $40 and $60 a month for video phone service. It was cool, but they didn’t want to pay a premium for it. And that’s if they already had the device. That same year AT&T opened Picturephone rooms in New York, Chicago, and Washington – you could rent one of these rooms for up to $27 for the first three minutes, and someone in one of the other cities would go to their room to Picturephonevideocall with you.
A total of only 71 calls were made in 6 months – PROBABLY BECAUSE IT WAS $90 PER MINUTE IN TODAY’S DOLLARS – and even though the facilities stayed open until 1970, not a single Picturephone call was made in the final YEAR. Here’s a question: What would YOU pay $90 a minute for? A year prior to AT&T’s zero customer year, they predicted that Picturephones would have 1 million users generating a billion dollars a year by 1980 – it was so exciting that film director Stanley Kubrick sent a team to Bell Labs to get a sense of what the future of communication would look like. And that’s why Dr. Floyd calls his daughter on a Picturephone in the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. So, the obvious solution was to roll it out to the masses – they had to plow forward because the future was waiting. In 1970 Picturephone opened markets in Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Oak Brook for home video call service. And again, it was really expensive – $160 per month for the equipment and service, which is about $1,322 per month adjusted for inflation. And it was 25 cents per minute after
the first half hour, which is $2.07 PER MINUTE today. Which… is definitely a lot better than $90. After a full year and a half of the test rollout in Pittsburgh, they had a total of… 8 customers. EIGHT. They even cut the price in half and it didn’t matter. Not only did people not want to spend all that money for video phones – a whole lot of people didn’t see the point in having a video phone AT ALL. Bell Labs and the citizens of Pittsburgh had unknowingly run afoul of the law.
Metcalfe’s Law. Computer engineer Robert Metcalfe coined the term to explain a phenomenon where the value of a networked device increases proportional to the square of the number of people connected to the system. So, videophones don’t have a lot of value until a lot of people are using them. And a lot of people aren’t going to use them until… A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE USING THEM. The value of video calling wasn’t obvious, most of its potential customers were somewhere on a spectrum of disinterested and hostile, it was hideously expensive, and it wasn’t significantly better than the cheap, existing alternative.
Video calling got switched off – if it was ever really switched on in the first place. The prospect of seeing and being seen as you talk pretty much went back into science fiction – like Captain Picard using video calls to talk to felicium addicts, which is basically space crack. That episode aired in April of 1988, a month after the VisiTel cover story in Popular Science – consumers were a little more comfortable with home technology and finally starting to get excited about it. Companies like Mitsubishi and Sony thought it was time to re-energize the idea of video calling. And they were so, so close to being right - use cases were emerging in unlikely places. The July ‘88 issue included an update from the editor in chief about VisiTels being used to alleviate jail overcrowding in Maryland – 7 people under house arrest were issued VisiTel units, and each day law enforcement could video call them to verify that they were, indeed, home. One offender said, “I’m not happy about it, but it sure beats going to jail.”
And a New York Times forum titled “Videophone: A Flop That Won’t Die” generated a response from doctors at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, who said that VisiTels could be useful as what we’d come to know as telemedicine – and even for families to communicate with patients who need to be in isolation for weeks at a time. This was 1992 – the doctors lamented that, “The bad news is that Mitsubishi stopped making these instruments; they were not profitable.” And about 10 minutes after THAT, all the standalone video calling devices, the Picturephones and the Visitels that techno-futurists had dreamed of for more than a century, were wiped completely off the map by the internet and webcams. And now despite 100 years of skepticism, every smartphone is… a video phone. Alright, it’s time to call Matt and it’s time to go back 35 years for a black and white, pixelated glimpse into the future.
Matt’s mom is a serious fan of old phones. She’s probably got 20 of them – so I borrowed this sweet one with the giant number pad.. I like this a lot. Unlike me, she’s got a landline, so I set Matt up with the other VisiTel. I had to buy a Cell2Jack bluetooth adapter, so I could pair this with my cell phone to mimic a landline. I plugged in the adapter’s power unit, and then I plugged the old phone into the VisiTel and then the VisiTel goes into the Cell2Jack. And just like that, I’ve got a fake landline. So now I just need to call Matt.
Matt: “Hello?” Kevin: Matt! You’re not gonna believe what game my mom got me for my birthday. Check this out. Hold on. Let me send it to you. Matt: Oh yeah, I’m comin’ over. Tell your mom I’m watching her microwave the bagel bites. I’m sending you my gamer face.
Kevin: Oh no. I don’t know what went wrong but your picture looks like Satan’s sonogram. The retrofuture is bleak. Thanks anyway, I gotta go. Matt: Alright see ya.
The Popular Science article ends with a quote from AT&T spokeswoman Daisy Ottmann stating that picture phones will be new and exciting “...only if you believe a picture’s worth a thousand words.” But… what if you only want the words? See you in the future.
2024-05-18 01:42
