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"Generally, the human race avoids doing anything radical until forced into it."
- Frederik Pohl

Opti-Phone  
  Yet another name for a videophone.  

The opti-phone bell rang.

Shelton snapped the “on” stud. The bewhiskered, jowled face of Grant Beatty, director of ETBI, flashed on the milky screen. One of the six men who, under the Earth Union's president, ruled the spaceways, his forceful personality reflected from a habitually grave face...

“Shelton,” he barked out of the speaker, “drop whatever you’re doing."

Technovelgy from The Impossible World, by Eando Binder.
Published by Startling Stories in 1939
Additional resources -

Compare to the detailed article about the telephonoscope from Le Vingtième Siècle (The Twentieth Century) (1882) by Albert Robida, the phonotelephote from In the Year 2889 (1889) by Jules Verne, the telephot from Ralph 124c 41 + (1911) by Hugo Gernsback, the video communicator from The Machine Stops (1909) by E.M. Forster, the zoom call visaphone system from John Jones's Dollar (1915) by Harry Stephen Keeler, the videophone from The Golden Girl of Munan (1928) by Harl Vincent and the optophone from Too Many Boards! (1931) by Harl Vincent.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Impossible World
  More Ideas and Technology by Eando Binder
  Tech news articles related to The Impossible World
  Tech news articles related to works by Eando Binder

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