The Videophone Turns 50: The Historic Failure That Everybody Wanted

Every day, around 50 million people a day stare at and speak to each other on computer or mobile device screens across the great expanse of the Internet via Skype, Apple's FaceTime, Google Hangouts or some other video conferencing software.

This voluminous amount of video phoning would have made 19th and 20th century futurists smile and shake their heads, marveling at both how remarkably right and horribly wrong their visual telephone predictions would turn out.

It was 50 years ago, on April 20, 1964, and during the subsequent months of the World's Fair at Flushing Meadow Park across from the brand-spanking-new Shea Stadium in Queens, New York, that Mr. and Mrs. America got their first chance to make a video telephone call on Bell's Mod I (Model I) Picturephone. Fair-goers had to wait on line at the Bell Telephone exhibit at the northeast tip of the Fair to hold a 10-minute visual talk with a complete stranger at a similar Picturephone exhibit at Disneyland in California Read more...