Picturephone

[ pik-cher-fohn ]

Trademark.

1. a brand of videophone that enables telephone users to see each other while talking.

Word History and Origins

Origin of Picturephone¹

First recorded in 1960–65

Example Sentences

“By this month it should be possible for a New Yorker, a Chicagoan or a Washingtonian to communicate with someone in one of the other cities by televised telephoning. The device to use is called a Picturephone and is described by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, which developed it, as ‘the first dialable visual telephone system with an acceptable picture that has been brought within the range of economic feasibility.’

From Scientific American

Reporting on the future of communication, J. R. Pierce, from Bell Labs, explained that “the Bell System is committed to the provision of a Picturephone service commercially in the early 1970s,” and that, by 2018, face-to-face communication across long distances would be available everywhere: “The transmission of pictures and texts and the distant manipulation of computers and other machines will be added to the transmission of the human voice on a scale that will eventually approach the universality of telephony.”

From The New Yorker

Much has improved since the days of the Picturephone: picture quality, audio quality, ease of setup, and cost.

From Slate

The Picturephone, which was equipped with a video camera and a screen, allowed curious New Yorkers to chat with and simultaneously look at people using the same device in Anaheim, California.

From Slate

AT&T is represented by, among other things, its Picturephone, a product that epitomized everything wrongheaded about Ma Bell: At a time when the Pentagon was financing the development of the robust and open-ended system that would eventually become the Internet, AT&T was trying to figure out how much data could be squeezed out of an image so it could be transmitted on low-bandwidth copper wires.

From New York Times