The Piggy Bank
Published: 12/30/24
The Piggy Bank
By John Stallone
Remember as kid having a piggy bank and putting your coins into it for savings?
You would deposit your Quarters, Dimes and Nickels and have no way of getting them out. The idea was for safe keeping so you couldn’t cheat and take some out.
There was always a time when you would try and figure out a way to get some money out and spend it for some candy but most of the time you were unsuccessful.
In the days of the old three slot pay phones, kids across America realized there was a piggy bank in almost every store and on every corner depending on where you lived, there was a payphone on every street. You just needed to figure out how to get the change out. Quickly, kids figured out there was no way out for the coins. The telephone company built a hardened “vault “ as it was known by the company that contained all the coins and within the vault there was a “Bank”, a metal box with a security guarded lid, so even the employee who collected the coins didn’t have access to them during collection.
Kids realized they had to get the coins before they were deposited into the money box aka “Bank”.
The coins are held in kind of limbo for a better way of referring to it until the call is either connected or not. If the call wasn’t connected the money would be returned through the return slot. Kids first figured if they stuffed up the coin return slot the money would be held up before it dropped into the slot.
The customer would be expecting to get their coin back and it wouldn’t drop down, they would get aggravated and most likely move on to another phone or call the operator for a refund. The money was just there waiting for the kid to return and pull out the stuffed paper and retrieve all the ill gotten coins.
When the Telephone Company realized that they were getting too many requests for refunds from a specific phone they dispatched a repairman and discovered the trick. After reporting on their
findings, Bell Labs got to work on a fix and developed an anti stuffing coin return slot. Now that people across America would no longer be cheated out of their returned coins, kids would have to find a new place to get free change, or would they?
Soon they figured out if they would jam the switch hook from releasing when you picked up the receiver and an unknowing customer would quickly deposit their coin to make a call and then realized there was no dial tone their coin would not be returned when they hung the receiver back up. Many people in a rush to make a quick call would just move on to the next phone giving up on their lost coin. This would happen over and over again stuffing the internal coin chute. The kids would eventually return to unjam the phone and with just a flick of the switch hook all the non refunded coins would eject making for a great trick to get quick change and beating the customer expecting their return. It was eventually discovered on routine maintenance and the condition was turned over to Bell Labs for a solution. They developed a new switch hook that could not be jammed, one with a rounded design that incorporated a ball bearing collar preventing it from being stuck.
As quickly as the telephone company could combat these scams another would arise more sophisticated than the last, this time someone figured out that if someone got access to the wiring and disconnected the yellow wire, the phone would work but would never return any coin that it needed to.
To understand this scam its a little bit more on the technical side and the average kid didn’t know how to do this. The telephone company had a bigger problem now with organized theft. The payphone requires a ground wire to operate properly which is the yellow one and in the old days they required a separate box called a subset that contained the bell and a wiring network. This box was mounted usually under the phones shelf in the booth or directly underneath the phone on the wall. The would be thief would open the box and disconnect the yellow wire then close up the box. The phone
appears fine and would work but if your call could not be completed and the phone needed to return your coin couldn’t.
The internal relay that tipped your coin into the return slot operated with that yellow ground wire connection and that was now missing.
The thief would return a day or so later and reconnect the yellow wire, the phone would now return all the money held up internally.
The thief would then disconnect it again, close up the box and move on to another phone that they had done the exact same scam too, collecting more ill gotten gained coins.
This had become an epidemic before it was discovered and the company decided that changing the screws that held the cover in place to the subset with a tamper proof type screw would solve the problem however to no avail.
It was eventually discovered that the crooks would just melt the cover around the screw with a lighter to get it off or break the cover off altogether to do the same scam.
At this point the company decided to move that box out of customers reach to the top of the
phone booth and keeping all wiring and connections out of reach which was a lot of time consuming work.
Bell Labs redesigned the Payphone to eliminate the need for the subset all together solving this problem permanently but this was towards the end of the three slot payphone’s life in the late 1960’s.
Something new was on the horizon a new completely redesigned armored single slot payphone that would solve all these problems, or would people just come up with new ways to cheat?
Wait and find out with the next article and the account of security breaches of the Telephone Company’s Payphone!
John Stallone
Curator/ Historian
Long Island Telephone Museum
Verizon New Vision Pioneers
Visit our website LongIslandTelephoneMuseum.com
Follow us on Instagram and Facebook
Visit us in person the first Sunday of every month except holiday weekends from 1-4 pm
Verizon
445 Commack Rd
Commack NY
HISTORY IS CALLING!!!!!!!