Pictures by Phone back then
Toronto. This November, 1934 article from Popular Mechanics brought back memories. Mid last century, the telephone was still voice-only in spite of this article decades earlier. As a young employee of “Ma Bell’, I remember Bell Labs in New Jersey tinkering with a gadget to send tiny B&W images over the telephone line to another person with similar gear.
Today, such conversations are common place – but not via the lowly ‘land line’ telephone. Computers, be they desktop, laptop, or smartphone, routinely allow conversations and videos between people. The old telephone? Nah, still just voice (although clearer than in yesteryear).
Today, we can even hold conferences and online teaching with people viewing people and notes or photos – all by the above media. My thanks to good friend, George Dunbar, for suggesting this article and the memories it brought back of the days when we felt (well, me anyway) that the Bell System would produce the ‘video phone’. We had no idea of the bandwidth we would need for such a venture to become reality. At the time, a quality telephone line ran about 100 cycles to 5,000 cycles – not even close to the bandwidth necessary for colour video.
To multiply the number of calls that a line could carry, we used ‘carrier systems’. For example the ‘N carrier’ offered 12 lines at a heavy penalty. Repeater stations had to be located every seven miles or so with every third station large enough to house huge Ni Cad batteries to power the repeaters at the station and either side of it.
