On this day, William Gray of Connecticut, the son of Scottish immigrants, a professional polisher and part-time inventor, patented his idea for a pay-phone. Gray was supposedly inspired to create an automatic pay-phone when no one would let him use their phone to call a doctor for his wife. Gray eventually found a phone and his wife recovered, but right after the incident he was determined to create phones, available for everyone at the drop of a coin. With his first pay-phone the coin triggered the removal of a cover from the mouthpiece, but he quickly improved on this idea by making a simple signal device for telephone pay stations. In 1891, he founded the Gray Telephone Pay Station Company to install pay-phones across the United States.
Not to mention the children, especially boys, who pushed the return coin button , hoping to collect some change
probaBLY BETTER COIN RETURN BUTTON—?
Yes, definitely! 🙂
Amazing how far we’ve come, from dropping a coin in a payphone to having the whole world in our pocket… though sometimes I think we’d be better off if we still had to hunt for a phone box now and then!
When I was ‘courting’ back in 1987, I had no house phone and the nearest call box was in a garage a couple of hundred yards away from my house. I organised all my social life from that garage with Italian “gettoni”, not coins.
Yes, things have changed a bit since then! 😀
Ha ha, Tony love that! Those were the days when making plans took a bit of effort, and a dash of adventure. Now it’s all a tap and a swipe! 😀 🧡