![]() Then came the flakiest pay-phone scam of all. The phone company wrapped the cord in metal armor. In later years, thieves learned to peel away the plastic phone cord and rub the bundled wires inside together, creating a short-circuit and a free connection. The telephone company came up with a new design, featuring a small blade that cut the string. One bell, with a deeper pitch, was beneath the quarter slot another, higher-pitched bell would register nickels and dimes.ĭeceptive callers tricked the system by using coins on strings to fish for free calls. The first generation of telephones was monitored by operators who had to listen, over the wires, for the sounds coins would make as patrons slipped them into the slots. The moose came calling soon after phone booths were installed in national parks: Several of the animals charged into the booths and destroyed them, having mistaken their reflections in the glass for a rival horning in on their area code.Ĭheaters abused pay phones in a different way, using everything from bells to whistles to make free calls. Mary's College in Morega, Calif., was 22. The college students made a loony competition of cramming as many kids into the booths as possible: The North American record, set at St. Soon the booths were attracting the attention of college students and the occasional moose. Outdoor booths began appearing on military bases during World War II and became prevalent in the '50s. ![]() Treasury changed the composition of coins, they checked with the telephone company to make sure the coins were compatible with pay phones. Pay telephones eventually became so deeply ingrained in American life that even the government catered to them: When the U.S. "In their lives," Liebling wrote, "the telephone booth furnishes sustenance as well as shelter, as the buffalo did for the Arapahoe and Sioux." Liebling watched hordes of fly-by-night entrepreneurs working the long banks of phone booths in Manhattan's hotel lobbies and called them "Telephone Booth Indians." In larger cities, the pay telephone was a haven for traveling salesmen. Up until then, says Sheldon Hochheiser, corporate historian for AT&T, "The pay telephone down at the grocery store was an important part of the neighborhood, a focal point of the community." Not until 1946 did more than half of American homes have telephones in them. For the next four decade,s they served as a community magnet in neighborhoods and small towns. By 1902, there were 81,000 pay telephones in the United States, most of them stationed inside restaurants, grocery stores and hotels. He collaborated with another inventor and installed the first attendant-free public phone in a Hartford bank in 1889. But the experience made him wonder if there wasn't a market for a coin-operated public telephone. Gray eventually tracked down a phone in a factory near his home in Hartford, Conn., and coaxed the foreman into allowing him to use it to summon the doctor. But the elegant, carpeted wooden booths were few and far between. Public phones were available in a few hotels and banks, where they were watched by attendants who collected payment when patrons finished their calls. The telephone was only 12 years old, still exotic enough that Mark Twain was wondering how people could be expected to have an intelligent conversation over long distances: In his experience, they had a hard enough time doing it in person. This was not an easy thing to do in 1888. Gray needed to find a phone to call a doctor for his ailing wife. William Gray certainly could have used one. In 1993, there were 13 million cell phones in the United States.
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