= Who invented the video telephone? = In April 1891, Alexander Graham Bell recorded conceptual notes of an electrical radiophone that discussed "....the possibility of seeing by electricity" using devices that employed tellurium or selenium imaging components. Bell went on to later predict that: "...the day would come when [we will] be able to see the distant person to whom [we're] speaking." The compound name 'videophone'entered general usage cir. 1950, although 'video telephone'likely entered the lexicon earlier after the noun 'video'was coined in 1935. Prior to that time there appeared to be no standard terms for 'video telephone', with 'sight-sound television system' and 'visual radio' being used to describe the marriage of telephone and television technologies used in early experiments. The technological precursor to the videophone was the teleostereograph machine developed by AT&T's Bell Labs in the 1920s, which was a forerunner of today's fax (facsimile) machines. By 1927 AT&T had created its earliest videophone 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. The first public video telephone service was developed by Dr. Georg Schubert and opened by the German Reichspost in 1938, but which quickly closed in 1940 due to the WWII. In that service trial, video telephone lines linked Berlin to Nuremberg, Munich, and Hamburg, with terminals integrated within public telephone booths and transmitting at the same resolution as the first German TV sets, at 440 lines. The Deutsche Bundespost postal service would later develop and deploy its BIGFON video telephony network from 1981 to 1988, serving several large German cities. The British General Post Office also operated another public video telephone service prior to World War II. In the United States AT&T conducted extensive research and development of videophones, leading to public demonstrations of its trademarked Picturephone product and service in the 1960s, including displays at the 1964 New York World's Fair. The demonstration units usually used small oval housings on swivel stands, intended to stand on desks. Similar AT&T Picturephone units were also featured at the Telephone Association of Canada Pavilion (the 'Bell' Pavilion) at Expo 67, an International World's Fair held in Montreal, Canada in 1967.Demonstration units were available at these fairs for the public to test, with fair-goers permitted to make videophone calls to volunteer recipients at other locations. The United States would not see its first public video telephone booths until 1964, when AT&T installed their earliest commercial videophone unit, the Picturephone Mod I, in public booths in three cities: New York, Washington, D.C. and Chicago. Picturephone booths were set up in New York's Grand Central Station and elsewhere. With fanfare, Picturephones were also installed in offices of Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, and at other progressive companies. However the use of reservation time slots and their initial cost of US$16 per three minute call at public booths greatly limited their appeal to the point that they were discontinued by 1968.

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