2001: the Picturephone

Relatively early on in the film 2001: a Space Odyssey, space bureaucrat Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) is seen phoning his young daughter (played by Kubrick’s daughter Vivian) from aboard an orbital space station.

He sits down at a console in a glassed-in “PicturePhone” booth and, before a dizzying view of the Earth spinning outside his window, pulls out his American Express credit card. Don't leave Earth without it, I guess.

The console was part of a large mocked-up video phone created in conjunction with American telecom monopoly Bell System. They provided research consultation and, in exchange, the pre-Saul Bass Bell logo can clearly be seen. 2001 was indeed a pioneer in the world of movie product placement.

In an age of easy video calls via pocketable mobile phones, the scene, awkwardness and all, may not seem like a big deal. But in 1968, a decade before the simplest personal computers, it was a pretty impressive demonstration of actual technology to come.

Future Phones sure are Complicated

This isn’t a world of touchscreen iPhones or point and click Macs or PCs. The concept of a user-centric interface hadn’t been developed by this point, and so a lot of machinery in the 2001 world was seemingly quite complex to operate. To underscore the point the phone had an instruction panel printed on the front.

You can’t read the text in the movie, and the console is basically shown from only one angle through the whole scene, but Piers Bizony’s book The Making of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey contains a high-resolution photo of the phone taken from the front, clearly showing the instruction panel. The row of blue buttons at the top are the letters of the alphabet. Unfortunately the pushbutton text just above the keypad is not fully legible.

As with other 2001 signage, the body text is set in Futura. The headings are Eurostile Bold. I’ve approximated the occasionally eccentric typesetting and inconsistent punctuation below. Note that the outside of the booth is branded PICTUREPHONE whereas the instructions refer to VISIONPHONE.

INSTRUCTIONS FOR USE OF VISIONPHONE

1 If you do not know the number use INFORMATION instructions

2 If you do know your number, proceed as follows

3 Press 2626 if you want a vision connection

Press 2627 if you want a non-vision connection

4 Press ON button to initiate your call

5 Press CALL to place the video system into operation

6 To see yourself prior to composing your number, press SELF

7 If you desire to see the person you are calling but not be seen
yourself, press 1 WAY Otherwise, press 2 WAY for video
at both ends. Note: the person you are phoning can override
your request for vision.

8 The screen will now indicate READY FOR CALL

9 You should promptly compose your number on the touchtone
panel directly below. You may start talking when the words
CHANNEL OPEN appear on the screen.

10 You can hold your channel open by pressing the HOLD button
and you can speak through the intercom by pressing LOC
Compose intercom numbers on the touchtone.

11 At the end of your conversation the words CHANNEL CLOSED
and the cost of your call will be indicated on the screen. You
may either insert your credit card through the indicated slot near
the bottom of the panel or place into the slots the appropriate
coins. 50, 75, and 100 cent pieces only are accepted.

INFORMATION INSTRUCTIONS

1 To obtain a number unknown to you, press the INFORMATION button to
the left above the pad.

2 Compose on the alphabetical panel above the pad the first two letters of
the continent (for example, Eu for Europe.) then the name of the major
political subdivision (state, Province, etc), and finally the city or town.
What you have composed will be confirmed on the screen.

3 Now compose on the alphabetical panel the name of the individual or
company you desire to phone. The appropriate section of the local direc-
tory will be displayed on the screen.

4 The specific portion of the directory section will be displayed on the
screen with yellow shading over the names being searched, for example
WINDSOR.

5 When you have found your number press the INFORMATION button again
to deactivate the channel.

6 Proceed to make your call according to the instructions at the left.

The text is phrased in subtly unusual ways in places, suggesting that native German speaker Harry Lange may have written the material. It certainly isn’t American English in style. The use of “pieces” to refer to coinage, for example, is a now dated form of UK English. And was 75 cents seen as futuristic unit of change?

However the references to the “touchtone” pad are certainly au courant. This was relatively new tech, but well known by the release of the film in 1968 – Bell had introduced Touch-Tone™ dialling to the American public in 1963.

The touchtone pad seems to be a normal phone pushbutton keypad with the * and # keys omitted, judging by the sculpted tops on the keys. The other pushbuttons, however, are production-made from acrylic sheet. Interestingly they’re almost identical to those aboard the Discovery and the EVA pod, but much smaller in size. This is because the spaceship buttons were meant to be operable by a gloved spacesuit hand, whereas a regular phone on Space Station V was to be used by people in ordinary clothes with bare hands. Attention to detail!

Over to the left you’ll notice a panel adorned with Nixie tube displays. This is actually a world clock equipped with ten time zones. Five of the zones are clearly legible: New York, Bombay (Mumbai since 1995), Tokyo, Sydney and San Francisco. I can't make out the other three cities, but I would guess something along the lines of London, Paris, and Moscow. Surprisingly, given Kubrick’s attention to detail, the clocks never change time during the conversation, which is longer than a minute.

But despite the convoluted nature of these instructions, it’s also worth noting that much functionality that we now take for granted is reflected in this phone design. The desire for people to preview their appearance prior to a call, for example, is built into any videoconf system today. Placing audio-only or video calls is another. Automated searching of global phone books is a function available in many systems, though of course geopolitical regions are kind of irrelevant in most cloud-based systems. And the ability to read a credit card automatically is taken for granted (except seemingly in the USA, where many restaurants still take your card away rather than reading it at the point of sale!).

Finally, it's amusing that the actions that Floyd performs in the movie to place his call don't actually correspond to the instructions at all! He simply inserts his credit card, dials 1 534 581 5445 in a slightly odd order, and is connected a brief moment later. US area code 534 is currently allocated to part of the state of Wisconsin, though at the time of filming it wasn't allocated to anywhere.

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