A Brief History of Video ConferencingA Brief History of Video Conferencing

The Dawn of Video Communication: Late 19th Century - 1927 Around the end of the 19th century, the first experiments on television suddenly made it clear that the communication systems of the time could not only transmit audio or telegraph but also video signals over long distances. Nevertheless, several dozens of years passed from the time the concept had been formed until its first physical implementation. After all, according to a Michigan State University paper, titled “Memories: A Personal History of Bell Telephone Laboratories,” the most basic video communication requires at least four interrelated components: audio transmission facilities, wire or radio channels with sufficient bandwidth, an image capture device or camera, and a display system or monitor. Audio transmission was relatively simple; video transmission was not. In fact, it was video that posed the real problem for many years. The first stable and operational TV cameras entered the market only in the second half of the 1920s. In 1927, AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories (later Bell Labs) created the world’s first working TV communication complex. Herbert Hoover's live moving image was transmitted over cable to New York, at a distance of more than 199 miles. This historic event was even captured on newsreel, as shown in the above slide.