The Humble Payphone

The Pay-phone

I needed to get in touch with Jake. Big Sal knew about our little plan, and that meant that it was time to get out of town. Couldn’t use the bar. Sal had friends there. Couldn’t just drive to where Jake was staying. If Sal was following me… Or if he had someone keeping a watch at the hotel, that’d be it.

I saw a pay-phone ahead. Hopefully that local teens hadn’t busted it. But no, it was intact, a single light shining down on it. I walked up to it, and dug in my pocket for some change and—

“There’s a toll for this phone.” I looked up and saw a couple of scruffy guys walking forward. One was holding a baseball bat. The other was holding a switchblade.

Looked like I was gonna have to work for my phone call.

Today, in most of the developed world, the pay-phone is an increasingly rare curiosity, replaced by  the nearly omnipresennnt cell phone. In fact, some of my younger friends have actually been confused when watching TV shows set before the 1990s, surprised that nobody seems to have any cell phones!

While there were previous attempts to create the pay phone, the first successful attempt was by a man named William Gray, who patented his phone in 1889, using a bell to signal to the operator as coins were deposited, allowing the operator to note if the proper amount of money was paid for the call. For this early design, coins were deposited after the call was placed. Needless to say, this type of transaction relied on the honor system.

Before this invention, the only way to use a “pay” phone was to find one of the rare stations where a human agent would collect your money before you could use the phone. Obviously, such stations were rare and expensive, often colocated with banks and other establishments that weren’t always available. By 1898 this system was replaced by the prepay phone, the Western Electric No. 5 Coin Collector being the first example of this model. By 1902, over 81,000 pay-phones existed in America, and that would only go up when in 1905, the first outdoor phone was installed, freeing the user from the tyranny of finding an open business to call from. While it took some time to catch on, the number of pay-phones would continue to expand, reaching well over two million phones in 1996 before the numbers started to decline.

But what did the pay-phone do?

The answer is quite simple. It brought instant communication to everyone, and increasingly let the comman citizen talk it on their own terms. In combination with the growth of home phones, pay-phones allowed people to travel across the nation, and yet with a little bit of money and some searching, find a phone to call their friends and families, whether they were across town or the nation. It also allowed teens more freedom. On the one hand, “call if you’re going to be late” couldn’t happen before the pay phone, and on the other, it allowed teens (and adults) to contact each other without relying on letters, or knowing that someone else could be listening in.

In the days before two-way radios, pay-phones allowed police, firefighters, and other emergency services to quickly contact their respective superiors to obtain assistance. Equally, bystanders could quickly summon help when a crime or disaster struck, putting added pressure on criminals. For the snitch, the pay-phone provided an easy way to keep in touch with the authorities, without the danger of a physical meeting.

The pay-phone played a vital role in the “shrinking of the world.” To people people who had previously only been able to talk face to face, or via letters, it was a quantum leap that was quite as impressive as our modern Internet. Sure you had to keep an eye on your watch and hope nobody else was using the pay-phone you were expecting someone to call into, but that beat what had come before!

Granted, it wasn’t all roses—more than a few cities came to believe that criminals were using the pay-phones, with drug dealers making use of the local street pay-phone to better conduct their business, while scammers and pimps found the pay-phone highly useful in the days before cell phones. Using phones for criminal activity became easier in the aftermath of  Katz v. United States, the decision that pay-phone conversations couldn’t be recorded without a warrant.

And from the other side, as any watcher or reader of private eye fiction set in the era of the pay-phone knows, finding a pay-phone might be a vital part of a private-eye’s day, especially if they had to quickly get in touch their their allies. For a police officer without a radio, a pay-phone might be the only way to get in touch with his superiors. In some places, police-only phones existed, but they never equaled the number of pay-phones you could find on the street.

Lastly, the longer you wanted to talk, or the further away they were, the more money a pay-phone took, and it wasn’t until the 1980s that prepaid phone cards were available, so for many people “Please add x amount to continue your call” was a warning that the phone call was about to be abruptly terminated. For teenagers and private eyes alike, buying a prepaid phone card was the key to long conversations without having to load their pockets down with change.

Laws attempting to restrict pay-phones were mostly created during the 1990s, supposedly to reduce crime. This combined with the rise of cell phones to gradually drive pay-phones out of common usage. Today, most phone-booths have been removed or are just occupied by an empty void where a pay-phone once took phone calls from sinners and saints alike. Ironically, the decline of pay-phones and the rise of cell phones has resulted in those individuals who cannot afford a cell phone being placed in the same difficult position people were put in before William Gray invented the first pay-phone. They must desperately look for someone, anyone who is willing to let them use their own phone, and all too often find themselves having no luck in their quest.

World Building:

So what does the pay-phone, or pay-crystal ball, depending on your story, mean? The answer is two-fold. First of all, it means that the characters in your story may have an easier time keeping in touch. They can make the choice to arrange for times when they can place a phone call, which means that as a writer, you may have to think about reasons why they might not do so.

Equally, antagonists and allies alike can also use this technology. Is your hero following someone in town? An interesting plot twist might have them make a phone call and arrange for friends and allies to drop by and have a not-so-friendly chat with the hero. Does a fight break out? Bystanders may be able to more quickly summon the police, which may be a good or bad thing, depending on what side of the law your character is on (or what side the first police officer to show up thinks they’re on).

It also makes the world larger. Now, it’s possible to keep in touch with friends, allies and enemies from across the country. If your story involves a strange ancient dagger that leaves mummies in its wake, well, the foremost authority in Aztec artifacts is only a call away… Of course, whether you can convince them to stay on the phone is quite another problem.

If you’re writing a political thriller, pay-phones allow for informants or dissidents to remain, if not anonymous, at least hard to find. While the phone company can track a pay-phone, the hero (or villain) can move around or keep their calls short. If there is a riot or revolt, the phones can be used to coordinate things, at least until the state shuts them down.

Additionally, you can use the presence or absence of pay-phones to further flesh out your world. A common sight in crime ridden neighborhoods were damaged or destroyed phones. People fumbling for change might be vulnerable to being mugged, and of course a full coin compartment only needs a sledgehammer and some effort to provide a quick payday.

The difference between a pay-phone in a brightly lit park, children playing in the park, and the same phone at night, a single light barely illuminating it while a band of scruffily dressed men and women hang around it can make all the difference in how the reader sees your story.

Meanwhile, wealthy neighborhoods might have few or no pay-phones on the street, perhaps keeping them in restaurants or stores as a way to discourage the “wrong sorts” from using them. Historically in America, the ‘wrong sorts’ had more to do with wealth and race than it did criminality. In writing, it’s an easy way to describe a neighborhood, not just physically, but emotionally, by showing, not telling.

Ultimately, for all we barely think of it anymore, the humble pay-phone can play a big role in your story, whether it’s about some teenage sleuths trying to call mom for a ride, or a man on the run, dodging his killers as he keeps in touch with his loved ones.