Pay Telephone

This week, Susan Molstad Wilson, a former Colby resident stopped at the museum while visiting relatives in the area. She came bearing a wonderful addition to our collection.

 This vintage pay phone is in excellent condition and it actually works. We connected it to our phone line and made and received calls on it. This one has been altered to bypass the "pay" feature. We don't have to feed it coins for it to operate. The only thing missing is the instruction and rate information card which would have been located directly under the dial.

This is a typical example of a Western Electric three-slot pay phone model 233G. Three-slot phones like this were used by Western Electric (Bell System) from the 1940's through the 1970's. They had a coin slot for each of 3 kinds of coins - Nickel, Dime and Quarter. When you inserted a coin, it either rang a special bell or gong to signal the operator what kind of coin it was. A nickel was one 'ding', a dime two 'dings', while a quarter was a 'gong' sound. For local calls, depositing a set amount of money completed a circuit to the local telephone company central switching equipment. The coin hopper flipped down allowing you to recover returned coins if the call was not completed or change was due. 

Early pay telephones could be found in phone booths on street corners or in public buildings. The first coin-operated phone was installed in a bank in Hartford, Connecticut in1889. In 1960 the Bell System installed its one millionth telephone booth. The peak number of pay phones in the United States was 2.6 million in 1995. By 2013 there were less than 500,000 as the major carriers exited the business, leaving the business to independent pay phone companies. Now, with the extensive use of cell phones, the pay telephone has become a rare item indeed.

Thanks, Susan, for donating this great piece of American history!