New York City this week ripped out its last municipally-owned payphones from Times Square to make room for Wi-Fi kiosks from city infrastructure project LinkNYC.
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This isn’t quite the extinction of payphones in New York City – according to the New York Post, private payphones on public property still exist, and four enclosed phone booths have been preserved on West End Avenue on the Upper West Side.
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The payphone was patented in 1889 by inventor William Gray, thirteen years after the invention of the telephone. It allowed callers to deposit coins in exchange for time-limited voice calls, often within enclosed booths or fixed cabinets. The first payphone, developed by George Long, was installed that same year in a bank, the Hartford Connecticut Trust Company. And by 1891, Gray had formed the Gray Telephone Pay Station Company to install payphones around the US.
According to the FCC, payphone usage peaked in 1999 when there were over 2.1 million of them installed across the US.
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Those too young to recall shoveling spare change into payphones may know them from popular media. In UK sci-fi TV show Doctor Who (1963-present), the iconic time-traveling Tardis took the form of a police box, a public telephone kiosk for contacting authorities. In Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), a telephone booth sheltered actress Tippi Hedren from rabid seagulls. And in The Matrix (1999), payphones provided the way in and out of the sort of simulated world Meta is keen to recreate and monetize.
Many more such scenes are commemorated through The Payphone Project website.
The history of payphones is inseparable from the IT industry. Early hackers used payphones for “phreaking” – manipulating phone networks to make free telephone calls. A 1971 Esquire profile of John Draper, a programmer, hacker, and phreaker known as Captain Crunch, led future Apple founders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs to start their first business selling a phone phreaking tool called “blue box.”
In a video interview, Jobs said, “If it hadn’t been for the ‘blue boxes,’ there would have been no Apple.”
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One of New York’s last city-owned payphones, newly removed, is headed to The Museum of the City of New York, where it will appear in an exhibition that opened earlier this month, “Analog City: NYC B.C. (Before Computers).”
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