On 13 August 1888, William Gray of Hartford, Connecticut filed his patent for a pay phone:
The object of my invention is to provide an apparatus that may be used in connection with a telephone as a pay-station, the said apparatus being provided with a coin-controlled lock that prevents the sending of messages, while it will allow them to be received.
The phone booth is a curious victim of the digital divide; it offered technology in a fixed place for a small sum of coins; that technology is now mobile and as for coins, large change has rendered small change obsolete.
The 2002 thriller “Phone Booth” was written by Larry Cohen, who acknowledged that he’d first floated the idea of a film unfolding from a booth over a three-hour lunch with Alfred Hitchcock three decades earlier. Hitchcock, of course, had trapped Tippi Hendren in a booth warding off winged marauders in 1963’s “The Birds”.
Hitchcock was born 11 years after Gray patented his apparatus, on 13 August 1899.
