A Story As Old As Rhyme To Save A Dime!
Published: 4/3/2025
So you want to make a free phone call
A story as old as rhyme just to save a dime!
People were trying to beat the charge of the phone call at almost every payphone, these unlawful efforts span as far back to when the call had cost just a nickel.
The advent of the payphone was out of William Grays’s sheer frustration of being unable to find a phone to call a doctor for his sick wife. He felt the need for access to a telephone was of growing importance especially when the cost was out of reach for most people. In 1889 his new invention was granted a patent. Coin telephones began to spread across America.
On January 21 of 1890 the first experimental pay telephones were installed in New York City by the Metropolitan Telephone & Telegraph company who was the predecessor company to the New York Telephone Company at the Barclay Street Ferry house. By 1902 there were some 81,000 coin phones across the country.
The early payphones had no way of returning your coins so you first had to follow instructions given to you by the operator for how much money to deposit after they knew, your call could be completed such as there was an answering party.
As time passed advancements were made to the technology and in 1908 this problem was solved by Otto Forsberg, a Western Electric engineer, he developed a coin return relay system, which the operator could directly use.
At this point AT&T and Western Electric entered into a manufacturing agreement in conjunction with the Gray Pay Station Company of Hartford CT. With Gray’s manufacturing plant using components designed by Western Electric, he designed a new standard payphone that combined patents from both AT&T and Gray, they debuted the model 50A in 1911. By the end of 1912, New York Telephone had installed in excess of 25,000 plus coin phones across New York City.
This style phone would stand the test of time well into the early 1970’s while they were being phased out by the single slot payphone. The original design underwent many changes internally and some externally but the overall look remained the same.
Going back to the early years of the teens and twenties, pay phones were placed primarily indoors for example; inside train stations, bus depots, corner stores, and apartment buildings. Opportunists took advantage of the secluded phones and tried to cheat and use something other than an actual coin to place a call.
Slugs as they were called were a common problem especially when people discovered that a washer used in manufacturing a ford model A could be used in a payphone instead of a nickel.
In 1927 the telephone company in Detroit was finding 15,000 slugs a month in the city alone, not to mention the rest of the country. Criminals began seeking out these specific washers and selling them as if they were drugs or its own currency entirely. The Bell Telephone Company was losing millions across the country every month, until AT&T’s chief engineer, Bancroft Gherardi solicited The American Standards Association or the (ASA), to ban the manufacture of any washers that matched the size of any US currency.
After a host of delays and nearly 5 years, the ASA finally capitulated and agreed to issue a new standard in 1933, banning washers the size of any US coin, which is still in effect today.
Although this scheme was solved, there would be many others that would arise to cheat the Telephone Company out of their rightful profits, these problems would become so prevalent that the company would hire their own “Special Agents”, the telephone police, if you will, to protect revenue in there coin phones, but I’ll have to drop a dime another time for that.
John Stallone
Curator/Historian
Long Island Telephone Pioneer Museum
Verizon New Vision Pioneers
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