They were once ubiquitous, but payphones have largely been made redundant in a world of personal smartphones, and on or after July 23, the last outdoor public one remaining in Ashcroft will be removed.
WiMacTel Canada Inc., acting on behalf of TELUS, has sent notice that the payphone — located at One Easy Stop on Brink Street — will be removed due to “a decline in usage”. Notification of the removal has been posted on the payphone.
The first use of a telephone was in March 1876, and by 1880 the Connecticut Telephone Co. had a payphone in their New Haven office, with the fee handed to an attendant. In 1889, the first modern public payphone in the United States, with a coin-pay mechanism built into it, was installed at the Hartford Bank in Hartford, Connecticut. Coins were deposited after the call was completed; the first “pre-pay” public phone debuted in Chicago in 1898.
At a time when telephones in private homes were still relatively rare, public payphones became a convenient way for many people to make calls. The first outdoor payphone booths — completely enclosed shelters made of glass which offered privacy, as well as protection from the elements — appeared by 1905; by 1925 there were 25,000 of them in New York City alone.
In Britain, the first standard outdoor pay telephone kiosk, designated as K1, appeared in 1921. The design of the kiosks underwent several changes over the years; the most famous iteration, the iconic red telephone kiosk that is still a symbol of Britain around the world, was K6, in 1935.
Here in British Columbia, there were 38,000 payphones in 1999; a number that had gone down to 18,000 in 2011. Today there are only 800 TELUS payphones in the entire province, most of them in hospitals, public transit stations, libraries, prisons, and corner stores.
Although the going rate for a payphone call in the United States was five cents until the 1950s, the phrase “drop a dime” began being used in crime novels starting in the 1920s. Meaning to secretly report a lawbreaker to the police or to snitch on a fellow criminal, the idiom came from the image of someone dropping a coin into a payphone, which was used to ensure anonymity and prevent the call (or the caller) from being easily traced.
Payphones — especially phone booths — were seized on by writers and filmmakers. Probably the most famous phone booth in fiction is the one used by Clark Kent to transform from a mild-mannered reporter into Superman.
In Britain, a close cousin of the phone booth — the police box, which contained a phone that members of the public could use to contact police — was used in the BBC-TV show Doctor Who (1963-present) as a disguise for the TARDIS, a time machine and spacecraft used by the Doctor in his or her adventures. A standard phone booth acts as a time machine in the Bill and Ted films, beginning with Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure in 1989
In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 film The Birds, Tippi Hedren’s character seeks refuge in a phone booth, only to have a succession of angry birds shatter the glass as she cowers inside. 1971’s Dirty Harry sees San Francisco cop Harry Callahan, played by Clint Eastwood, sent on a chase from payphone to payphone, figuring out a clue at each one to prevent the murder of a young girl (the same premise was used in 1995’s Die Hard: With a Vengeance). The “big con” used to get revenge on mob boss Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw) in the 1973 film The Sting uses a payphone as a key part of the scheme, while the 2002 film Phone Booth has the main character trapped inside the titular structure by a sniper who threatens to kill him.
Numerous suspense, mystery, and thriller films used payphones to create tension — the sight of a receiver dangling on the end of its cord was convenient shorthand for something sinister having happened to the person who had just been using it — but comedies also used them to good effect. In Arsenic and Old Lace (1944), Cary Grant and Priscilla Lane try to hide in one to evade reporters, while in Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1986), Whoopi Goldberg’s character is abducted when the phone booth she is in is picked up by a tow truck and dragged away, with Goldberg still inside.
In the 1986 film Clockwise, John Cleese is frustrated when none of the three K6 kiosks he stops at are in working order, and in 1998’s Waking Ned Devine a meddling character uses an isolated phone booth to try to drop a dime on her fellow townsfolk, only to have her scheme undone by a driver with allergies. Perhaps the most famous comic use of a phone booth, however, was in the opening credits of the TV series Get Smart (1965-1970), where agent Maxwell Smart enters a phone booth at the end of a long passage, drops a coin in the phone, and is whisked away to the headquarters of CONTROL.
Ironically, the demise of payphones was foreshadowed by a prop that featured prominently in the show: Max’s shoephone, which he used while out in the field. The invention and adoption of mobile phones meant that payphones became increasingly redundant in a world where people carried a phone in their purse or pocket at all times; in 2017 it was estimated that 95 per cent of Americans had a mobile phone. The fact that payphones and phone booths were prone to vandalism and abuse, and widely used by drug dealers, gamblers, pimps, and scammers, also hastened their end.
Payphones are not quite dead, however: WiMacTel says they are still available if someone wants to purchase and install one. After the recent outage experienced by Rogers, which left millions of users across Canada without wireless service, installing a payphone might be an attractive option for an enterprising business. Payphones might be old school, but they were not affected by the outage.
editorial@accjournal.ca
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