“In a few years, it’s sure to work wirelessly and, perhaps with the help of a device called the Telephotophone, will be able to hear and speak at the same time. ‘Pocket models’ allow you to continue a conversation started even on a trip or a walk.“.

Sounds like the day before yesterday, reflections of some visionaries of the 70’s or maybe 50’s luckily; but what you have just read is part of a chronicle published in the German newspaper entitled “Miracles Our Children May Still Live”. Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung in… -drum roll- 1928. almost a century agoNot long after John Logie Baird began tinkering with electromagnetic television, and here in Spain there were still large areas without public light.

There have always been visionaries and people with a good sense of smell. This is not new. what is surprising about the passage Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung almost the opposite happens: no matter what it may seem to us today, its author was not so avant-garde when he wrote these lines. He was right, yes, and he sums up what would eventually become the modern with respectable purpose. smart phones; but his readers may find something similar to what he described in the 1930s.

“A Humanity’s Dream”

How? Easy. In Nazi Germany, keeping the distance, a communication service that could be considered the precedent of modern Google Meet, Zoom or Skype briefly worked. During the second half of the 1930s, the country tested a videoconferencing system, a “Fernseh-Sprech-Verbindung” in German, which basically allowed us to do what we do today when we connect Zoom: talk face-to-face. someone who is miles away.

It was not a service available to all pockets, it was not implemented across the country, and of course its quality left much to be desired; but of course it served to showcase the chest of Adolf Hitler’s Germany and to show the rest of the world the strength of its technological sector.

The service began almost ninety years ago, on March 1, 1936, during the opening of the Leipzig Spring Fair, and at the gates of the Olympics that same summer, when half the planet’s attention was focused on Germany. To start this, the line connecting Leipzig to the capital of the country, Berlin, was chosen and a magnificent show was held. Minister Paul Freiherr von Eltz-Rübenach and Mayor Carl F. Goerdeler acted as the “ceremonial masters” of this telephone call, which should be noted for gestures, yawns and clamors.

“Television entertainment at every distance ahead fulfilling another human dream: we can talk to a person in a distant place and see him as if he is standing in front of us,” said von Eltz-Rübenach, drawing attention as the culmination of a speech full of epic rhetoric. To achieve this, he still had a lot of work to do.

If von Eltz-Rübenach and Goerdeler were able to hold a remote “face-to-face” conversation in March 1936, it was mainly thanks to the advances of the previous decade. In and out of your own country. In the 1920s, Baird and AT&T had already explored the possibilities of the video phone, and in Germany, during the Great German Radio Exhibition in 1929, G. Krawinkel demonstrated that two people could see each other while talking on the phone.

The first line made use of the television coaxial cable laid. Between Berlin and Leipzig and it worked with two pairs of intercoms located in recognizable buildings at both locations. In the same year, cable and stations were extended from Trebnitz to Nuremberg and, over time, advanced to other urbanized areas of the country such as Munich or Hamburg.

Just because it’s more common doesn’t mean it’s more implanted. Video conferences were “private and expensive,” as the Deutsches Ferbseghmuseum recalls. A local connection cost 1.5 Reichsmarks, and a long-distance connection cost twice as much as a regular connection of the same duration. World He states that using the service means 7% of his weekly salary.

Despite all the splendor and halo of modernity, the new service was also not comfortable: those who used it had to go to the offices of the ReichPost (“Fernsehsprechstellen”) and stand in front of the screen with headphones on. As for the quality of the video images, users scanned a mechanically controlled light beam 25 times per second with a photocell capable of capturing 40,000 pixels. Neither one nor the other seemed important to officials who were convinced of its potential. technically polished with years.

Nazi Germany’s “Google Meet” didn’t have much room for improvement, anyway. With the turn of the decade marked by the outbreak of the Second World War, authorities abandoned service on the route between Berlin, Leipzig and Munich, as the video signal interfered with other transmissions. The fire itself prevented the service from benefiting from improvements such as G. Krawinkel’s experiment for storage in 1938.

Fortunately, the end of her story didn’t mean the end of video calls. A new device was presented during the London Radio Exhibition in 1952, and in the 1960s US operator AT&T launched its own system at the New York World’s Fair: the Picturephone, another equally new and advanced invention. unlucky in. By the end of the 1970s, the company was confident that 85% of meetings would already be held via videoconferencing, a prediction far from reality. The new system was very expensive.

Neither in the 70s, nor in the 80s, nor in the 90s; however, the history of the videoconferencing had a happy ending. With the pressure of the pandemic, today we are connecting more than ever to chat with our friends, family, partner or co-workers as AT&T envisions. Perhaps the bonus is not for the Reich system; however, time has shown that they were not mistaken in choosing a form of communication that mixes image and sound.

He didn’t. And neither, unconfirmed, that ancient prophecy Berlin-based illustrator.

Pictures | Fernseh Museum