ABSTRACT
Chapter Five presents a case study of Bell Labs’s two-way television project, also called the ‘Ikonophone’. Looking closely at press coverage of the Ikonophone project and the language journalists, writers of popular science, and engineers used to describe their experiences interacting with the screen, this chapter examines the reception and construction of television in the 1920s. Engineers described the method of designing an environment in which the user was made to feel as if they were face-to-face with the distant party. Witnesses responded to what they saw on the screen with a confused combination of metaphors, mingling expressions of a feeling of closeness with reactions to its uncanny artificiality. The Ikonophone marks the moment of television’s transition from a technology into a visual medium.
