Public Telephones
By Sheldon Hochheiser,
Ph.D., IEEE History Center
What did you do
the last time that you needed to make a call
away from your home or office? You probably
did not seek out a public telephone and
insert a coin or two in the slot. Though, if
you are like most people, you can recall
having done so. But you’d likely be hard
pressed to remember the last time you did
this instead of reaching for your cell. Pay
phones may be retreating from memory today,
but for most of the years since Alexander
Graham Bell’s first telephone call in 1876,
they were an important part of how people
used the telephone network.
The first
public phones and booths appeared in
telephone company offices in the early
1880s. A customer could pay an attendant to
make a call. One key innovation came in
1889, when Connecticut inventor William
Gray, frustrated with having to beg use of a
phone to summon a doctor when his wife took
ill, devised the first coin-operated public
telephone. He installed his first pay phone
in a Hartford bank. In Gray’s patented
design, coins of different denominations
traveled down separate chutes where they
struck bells and gongs that the operator
could hear to verify the payment. Pay phones
gradually spread across the country; by 1902
there were 81,000. Many of these were in
places such as drug stores and train
stations where they served the public at
first ten and then five cents per local
call. When making a toll call on these early
pay phones, customers had to be careful to
wait until the operator said how much money
to deposit; there was no way for her to
refund the coins. This remained a problem
until electrical engineer Otto Forsberg of
telephone manufacturer Western Electric
invented the coin return in 1908. Then
Western Electric working together with
Gray’s company designed and introduced a
standard pay phone, the Western Electric
model 50-A (see picture) in 1911. Within a
year, AT&T’s New York Telephone subsidiary
had installed 25,000 in New York City alone,
almost all of them indoors in wooden booths.
Into the 1940s, public phones were more than
conveniences for travelers. They were
neighborhood phones as well, since no more
than forty percent of the population had
phones in their homes.
Photo courtesy of AT&T Archives and History
Center.
There were
always people who wanted to save their
nickels and cheat the system. Slugs became a
serious problem in the 1920s when people
discovered that industry standard washers
would register as coins in pay phones. In
1927, the telephone company took 15,000
slugs a month from the pay phones in Detroit
alone. Working with a committee of the
American Standards Association, AT&T Chief
Engineer (and 1927-1928 AIEE President)
Bancroft Gherardi obtained agreement for
revised washer standards, which after a
variety of delays, ASA issued in 1933. The
new washers worked fine in automobiles, but
not telephones.
Over the years,
the number of pay telephones continued to
grow, as did the variety of their
installations. During World War II, AT&T
placed banks of booths at military
facilities across the country so soldiers
and sailors could call home. For most
people, this was the first time they made or
received a long distance call. The evening
volume was so heavy that AT&T advertised
that people not make long distance calls
then so the lines would be open for men in
uniform.
Photo courtesy of AT&T Archives and History
Center.
Outdoor booths
first appeared in 1940s, and became common
with the development of glass and aluminum
booths in the 1950s. Installations where one
could call from a car at the side of the
road began dotting the highways in the
1960s. And in 1965, AT&T introduced its
first redesign of the pay telephone — the
single slot, flat fronted 1A1. Public
telephone use continued to grow. By the mid
1990s there were over two million across the
country. This number held steady through the
end of the decade.
When cell
phones were introduced in 1983, they hardly
seemed like competition. They were
expensive, and for the most part permanently
installed in cars. But as prices declined,
and the phones became small and portable,
cell phone ownership spread, and pay phone
use fell. As a result, the number of pay
phones began an inexorable decline; by 2007
only 872,000 were left. And where they still
exist, they may do so for unusual reasons.
For example, in New York City, sidewalk pay
phones are easy to find because they earn a
profit to their owners and the city from the
revenue brought in by advertising on the
enclosures, even if no one ever makes a
call.
E-mail
this page to a friend
