Telephone booth
[citation needed] William Gray is credited with inventing the coin payphone in the United States in 1889, and George A.
[6] In the UK, the creation of a national network of telephone boxes commenced in 1920, beginning with the K1 model which was made of concrete; however, the city of Kingston upon Hull is noted for having its individual phone service, Kingston Communications, with cream coloured phone boxes, as opposed to classic royal red in the rest of Britain.
The Post Office was forced into allowing a less strident grey with red glazing bars scheme for areas of natural and architectural beauty.
Being made of glass and aluminium, they were designed especially for the outdoors and originally intended to serve motorists traveling on the highway.
In the United States, this replacement was caused, at least in part, by an attempt to make the pay telephones more accessible to disabled people.
Many locations that provide pay-phones mount the phones on kiosks rather than in booths—this relative lack of privacy and comfort discourages lengthy calls in high-demand areas such as airports.
Special equipment installed in some telephone booths allows a caller to use a computer, a portable fax machine, or a telecommunications device for the deaf.
[10] The 1965–1970 television series Get Smart used a phone booth, among other devices, as a secure means of entering CONTROL headquarters.
"[11] The 1986 comedy film Clockwise features John Cleese's character vandalising a phone in a booth in frustration after it malfunctions.
For example, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Katz v. United States involved the Constitutional question of whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) could install a listening device outside of the booth.
A rise in vandalism has prompted several companies to manufacture simpler booths with extremely durable pay phones.
By 2007, Finnet companies and TeliaSonera Finland had discontinued their public telephones, and the last remaining operator Elisa Oyj did so early the same year.
[24] In May 2023 AGCOM established that TIM no longer has the obligation to guarantee the availability of telephone booths, with the exception of "places of social importance", such as hospitals (with at least ten beds), prisons, and barracks with at least fifty occupants.
[31] Some decommissioned red telephone boxes have been converted for other uses with the permission of BT Group, such as housing small community libraries or automated external defibrillators.
[32][33] Beginning in the 1990s, many large cities began instituting restrictions on where pay phones could be placed, under the belief that they facilitated crime.
[35] Only four phone booths remain in New York City, all on Manhattan's Upper West Side; the rest have been converted into WiFi hotspots.
In February 2020, the city confirmed that despite a plan to remove dozens of pay phones, the iconic booths would continue to be maintained.
[40] This is in addition to the ST6 public telephone introduced in 2007 which is designed to feature a phone on one side and a JCDecaux-owned advertising space on the otherside.
