Wireghosts in the Parlor, 1927
In 1927, German engineers transmitted a moving face across a wire. This was not film but live—the image of a man speaking, beamed between cities using early television technology. By the 1930s, AT&T's "Picturephone" experiments echoed the same goal in the United States: instantaneous sight and speech across distance. Video calling, as a technical feat, was solved before World War II.
So why did it take nearly a century for the technology to become a household utility?
The delay wasn’t technological—it was cultural, commercial, and infrastructural. Early video calls required vast bandwidth and fragile equipment, but more than that, they unsettled people. Seeing without presence felt uncanny. Phones were intimate; video was intrusive. The market recoiled. Cold War surveillance anxieties didn’t help. By the time bandwidth caught up, new safeguards were needed: encryption, consent protocols, camera toggles. The video call, once a marvel, had become a site of potential exposure.
It took nearly 100 years not to build the signal—but to shield the self behind it.
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