Debut of the First Picturephone (1970) - AT&T Archives

See more from the AT&T Archives at Before 1970, the Picturephone was a long-awaited piece of technology that was heavily promoted by the Bell System as the appliance of the future. It was the culmination of decades of work - Bell Labs’ first functional picturephone had actually been built over 4 decades earlier. That first device used a television broadcast sent over the phone lines, which was impractical on a larger scale. The public first witnessed the Picturephone at the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens, NY. Soon thereafter, the Bell System rolled out three Picturephone booths in Washington DC, New York, and Chicago. These three Picturephones could communicate only with each other. Costs ranged from $16 to $27 for three minutes (that’s $118 to $200 in 2012 dollars!). This film contains footage from the 1970 inaugural call at the launch of commercial service in the first test city, Pittsburgh. The call was made from Mayor Pete Flaherty, in Pittsburgh’s Bell Telephone HQ au