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.
