You Don't See Many of These Any More

It has rained here all day long from when I woke up and it's still going strong. The hubby and I had to go out for awhile today and while we were stopped getting gas, I spotted this pay phone. Since cell phones came to be, it's rare to see one of these. So rather than my usual landscape or flower or bug, I decided to make this my blip for the day. A real live pay phone.

I remember when I was old enough to go off by myself, my mother always reminding me to keep a dime on me just in case I needed to use a pay phone while I was out. Some years later it was a quarter. From what I read now the pay phones are up to fifty cents.

Some facts:

Payphones were preceded by pay stations, manned by telephone company attendants who would collect payment for calls placed. In 1889, the first public coin telephone was invented by William Gray and installed at a bank in Hartford, Connecticut. The invention quickly caught on, and by 1902, there were 81,000 payphones in the United States. By 1905, the first outdoor payphones with booths were installed. By the end of 1925, 25,000 of these booths existed in New York City alone. In 1960, the Bell System installed its one millionth telephone booth. After the divestiture of Pacific Bell (California) and AT&T in 1984, it wasn't long before independent stores selling telephones opened up. After that privately owned payphones hit the market. In 2000, there were over 2 million payphones in the United States, today that number is around 700,000, the major carriers AT&T and Verizon have both exited the business, and this market is served by independent payphone companies now. Between 2007 and 2008 the number of payphones in the United States in operation declined by 58 percent.