Towards a Digitized Workplace

The quote, illustrating how remote communications had been envisioned before World War II, is part of the verbiage on the back of collectable cards and stickers published by the German company Echte Wagner back in 1930. The quoted verse is part of a card that vividly portrays two women sitting outdoors while chatting to presumably their family members using portable monitors (Mann, 2021). Shortly after the first publicly demonstrated one-way videophone call in 1927 by then US Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover (Schnaars & Wymbs, 2004), the Echte Wagner’s futuristic projection of videotelephony illustrated how individuals would be able to converse and exchange information with the use of a live video. Inspired primarily by these ideas, a closed-circuit videophone experiment took place in 1936, 6 years after the release of Echte Wagner’s cards, by a German visual telephone system called Gegensehn-Fernsprechanlagen. That video call connected the Minister of Post, Paul von Eltz-Rübenach, who was stationed in Berlin, and Leipzig’s mayor, Carl Friedrich Goerdeler. By mid-1938, said videophone system had expanded from Berlin and Leipzig to the cities of Nuremberg and Munich and was made available to the German public through specially designed videophone booths that enabled rudimental videocalls between the four cities (Burns, 1995). Lewis and Cosier (1997) see this historical development as a major milestone for kindling society’s interest in developing telepresence systems – and subsequently, virtual-world multimedia environments – that enable individuals to interact remotely.