New York Watches the First Long-Distance Television

On April 7, 1927, reporters and Bell Telephone Laboratories staff packed an auditorium in New York City to watch something no one in the country had watched before: a moving picture of a man who wasn't in the room. The face on the screen belonged to Herbert Hoover, then U.S. Secretary of Commerce, sitting in a studio in Washington and speaking by wire to AT&T president Walter Gifford in New York. Bell engineers Herbert E. Ives and Frank Gray had built the mechanical scanning system that carried Hoover's image up the line, through a relay station in Whippany, New Jersey, and onto a screen assembled from twenty-five hundred individual neon lamps. It was a novelty act by later standards, jerky and dim, but it was the first time long-distance television had worked in America, and New York was the city that got to see it first.