On April 7, 1927, an audience comprising several dozen newspaper reporters and officials of Bell Telephone Laboratories gathered in New York City to witness the first American demonstration of television.

The live picture and voice of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover were transmitted over telephone lines from Washington, DC, more than 200 miles north to an auditorium in midtown Manhattan. Hoover would be elected President of the United States in November 1928.

“Today we have, in a sense, the transmission of sight for the first time in the world’s history,” Hoover said, as he looked into a small black box and spoke into a telephone mouthpiece. “Human genius has now destroyed the impediment of distance in a new respect, and in a manner hitherto unknown.”

Although the audio portion was two-way, only those in New York were able to see Hoover on a rectangular television screen measuring approximately 2×2.5 inches as he spoke to Walter S. Gifford, president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T).

A 2001 book by Gerald Leinwand, 1927: High Tide of the 1920s , mentions a New York Times front-page article that was published the next day in response to the demonstration. It described the transmission “Like a Photo Come to Life” but also cautioned “Commercial Use in Doubt.” The New York Times reporter, still obviously impressed by the technology, wrote: “The demonstration of combined telephone and television, in fact, is one that outruns the imagination of all the wizards of prophecy. It is one of the few things that Leonardo da Vinci, Roger Bacon, Jules Verne, and other masters of forecasting failed utterly to anticipate.”

A video of the demonstration can be seen here.



An audience in New York saw an image of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover speaking from Washington, D.C. Engineers from Bell Laboratories had invented the transmission system not for entertainment purposes, but with the intention of learning more about long-distance networks.

According to AT&T’s site, Herbert Ives, who led the company’s television research during the 1920s and 1930s, developed telephotography, a system that paved the way for today’s fax machines by transmitting photographs over telephone lines. The technology was first demonstrated in 1924.

In January 1925, Ives proposed speeding up the picture system. His goal was to transmit images so rapidly one after the other that they would appear to a viewer as motion. Working with two colleagues, Ives developed a system that produced a crude but recognizable picture. By early 1927, he was able to transmit a television signal hundreds of miles by wire and dozens of miles by radio.

In his 2009 book The History of Television, 1880 to 1941 , historian Albert Abramson underscored the significance of the Bell Labs demonstration: “It was in fact the best demonstration of a mechanical television system ever made to this time. It would be several years before any other system could even begin to compare with it in picture quality.”

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Editor’s note : This article was originally posted on April 7, 2014 and edited on April 7, 2019.