Unknow AT&T History Part 1

In light of the present AT&T and T-mobile merger I wanted to review some of the lesser known products of "Old Mama Bell."

When you think about a video phone most people think of the iPhone face time, Skype or  iChat. What most people don't know is the concept for the video phone has been around since before World War 2. 

The first video phone was built in Germany in the 1930's. The service had video telephone lines linked from Berlin to Nuremberg, Munich, and Hamburg. Terminals were integrated within public telephone booths and transmitted at the same resolution as the first German TV sets. The person on the other side of the call would go to a special post office video telephone booth in their respective cities. The service end at the beginning of World War 2.

In 1964, AT&T unveiled their "PicturePhone" at the New York Worlds Fair . Two years later they had a Telephone Pavilion in the Montreal World Fair. It was offered commercially in Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C.  PicturePhone booths were set up in New York's Grand Central Station and elsewhere and in select progressive companies.

The user would have to make a reservation at time slots for the cost of $16 per three minute call.  The high price for a call made from public booths greatly limited the appeal to the point that they were discontinued by 1968.

In less than 5 years the video phone was died. Bell labs-- AT&T research branch, spent a reported 500 million developing the tech behind it. What hurt the video phone was the cost of the device, each unit cost 1,500 --you can imagine how ludicrous of a price this was given that it was the mid 60's. This points to a wider flaw in AT&T, They have always been great visionary, but not the best in rolling out new tech to the general public. 


AT&T and Radio

 AT&T wanted to completely dominate the nation's system of broadcasting. The Telco's plan would make it almost impossible for broadcast license holders not affiliated with the carrier to operate.  The scheme was hatched in 1922 and abandoned by 1926.

On August 28, 1922, WEAF in New York City aired a  a ten-minute talk by a representative of a real estate company--this was the first radio commercial. The station charged $50 for it, and another in the evening for $100.

AT&T had other big ideas—a network of almost 40 radio stations strung together via the Telco's long distance lines. They would broadcast to local areas wirelessly and share content via AT&T's long routes. The company intended WEAF as the beginning of that experiment.

They tired unsuccessfully to push out competitors by first denying non-Bell System radio stations access to its long distance lines for shared projects, forcing other networks to experiment with inferior telegraph rather than telephone connections for their experiments. Then AT&T became more aggressive by suing a nearby competitor of WEAF, claiming that its broadcast operation infringed on the carrier's patents.

After government pressure and increased competition AT&T got out of the Radio business.