Videophone
Entry updated 29 September 2025. Tagged: Theme.
The telephone with an inbuilt video link was one of the oldest and most commonly used sf gadgets – indeed one of sf's many futuristic Clichés – long before its ubiquity in the real world; the precise Terminology varied considerably. An early appearance of "videophone" in a futurological context (see Futures Studies) was in the UK Radio Times for 6 July 1928, and its first use in a Genre SF context may have been in Harl Vincent's "War of the Planets" (January 1929 Amazing as H Vincent). Other adopters of that term include A E van Vogt in the first serial instalment of The World of Ā (August-October 1945 Astounding; rev 1948); C L Moore in the revision of her "No Woman Born" (December 1944 Astounding) for Great Stories of Science Fiction (anth 1951) edited by Murray Leinster; Isaac Asimov in "The Key" (October 1966 F&SF); and others, continuing into the new century.
The concept, under other names or simply unnamed, is of course considerably older. In a captioned drawing for Punch (9 December 1879), George du Maurier whimsically imagined "Edison's Telephonoscope", whose "electric camera-obscura" accompanies a UK-Australia phone conversation with moving images from the other end of the line. Jules Verne's In the Year 2889 (February 1889 The Forum; 2007 chap) – perhaps mostly or wholly by his son Michel Verne – posits the similar "phonotelephote". Mark Twain's "From the 'London Times' of 1904" (November 1898 The Century) has a videophone known as the "telelectroscope". The telephone in "2002": Childlife One Hundred Years from Now (1902) by Laura Dayton Fessenden includes a "Press Button To See The Person Talking" option: "I have called her up by telephone [...] and have seen her and talked with her ..." Hugo Gernsback in Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660 (April 1911-March 1912 Modern Electrics; exp as fixup 1925; rev 1950) called it the Telephot and threw in a language translation function (see Universal Translator). Harry Stephen Keeler's "John Jones's Dollar" (August 1915 Black Cat) has the Visaphone, a term later echoed by genre creators with or without slight spelling variations; Keeler's version anticipates video-conferencing, with a professor addressing and able to receive responses from a widely scattered student audience whose faces are displayed on "three or four hundred frosted glass squares". Private phones and public call boxes with videophone capability appear in Cold Comfort Farm (1932) by Stella Gibbons; as with Fessenden above, these are not given any fanciful futuristic name but simply called telephones. (It is an interestingly British quirk that Gibbons's public phones have video cameras but not the presumably expensive display screen, so the pictorial aspect of a featured communication is one-way only.) Facilities offered by the home Computers known as logics in Murray Leinster's "A Logic Named Joe" (March 1946 Astounding), as by Will F Jenkins, include videophone-like Communication, conferencing and recording.
Cinema and Television versions, generally not named, appear in Metropolis (1927), Men Must Fight (1933), The Tunnel (1935; vt Trans-Atlantic Tunnel), Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), Johnny Jupiter (1953-1954), The Jetsons (1962-1963) – as the Visaphone (see above) – the original Star Trek (1966-1969) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968).
Another popular name, in fact used as the entry headword in the first edition of this encyclopedia, was the now almost forgotten "vidphone". Examples are found in Philip K Dick's "The Variable Man" (1953 Space Science Fiction), Larry Niven's "Flatlander" (March 1967 If), Norman Spinrad's Bug Jack Barron (1969), William Shatner's Tekwar (1990) and Arthur C Clarke's 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997). In the 1979 SFE it was considered necessary to explain that "A vidphone is like a telephone which transmits pictures as well as sound. (Though expensive, they are now commercially available in the real world.)"
Further variant names include Visophone in C G Wates's "A Modern Prometheus" (Fall 1930 Amazing); Visiphone in Otis Adelbert Kline's "The Man from the Moon" (October 1930 Amazing) and several later tales by others; "vision plate" in J M Walsh's Vanguard to Neptune (Spring 1932 Wonder Stories Quarterly; 1952), a more generic term here used in the videophone context; "viewphone", hyphenated in Raymond Z Gallun's "The Revolt of the Star Men" (Winter 1932 Wonder Stories Quarterly) and with no hyphen in Robert A Heinlein's "Waldo" (August 1942 Astounding as by Anson MacDonald); Teleview, used from the late 1920s with various meanings (e.g. CCTV display or Spy-Ray) but clearly a videophone in Festus Pragnell's "Conspirators of Phobos" (June 1943 Amazing); and "vidscreen" in Philip K Dick's "Mr Spaceship" (January 1953 Imagination) and further Dick tales including Ubik (1969). [DRL]
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