Figure 1 – Alexander Graham Bell in New York City calling Chicago in 1882. From the Wikipedia, originally from the US LOC and in the public domain because of its age.

I received an advertisement/invitation from my alma mater the other day, suggesting that I might want to join a tour of Eastern Europe. There, I was promised, I could sit once more in a telephone booth.  This was touted as the ultimate retro experiment. But it got me wondering why the payphone was something worth reliving. When I grew up these were everywhere around NYC and most of them didn’t work. Worse, most of them first took your money and then didn’t work. But the most unappealing aspect of the pay phone or telephone booth was the stench of tobacco, body odor, and the proliferation of germs. It was the key target of enterprising young reporters investigative reports, who had their sights on the legacy of Nellie Bly and who would have them swabbed and the swabs cultured to reveal a plethora of bacterial species, many only to be found, well how shall I put this, in your nether regions. Same is true of support bars and straps in subway trains. It is best to assume a self-protective disposition.

But the point that I am making is a simple one. There’s a reason that they call it progress. And this is a significant one. Cellphones are a lot cleaner than payphones ever were. It’s a matter of preserving the species. 

So I went in search of a decent copyright-free payphone image, and this to no avail. There were of course all sorts of tardis images for “Dr. Who” aficionados. There were also a few images of 1940’s and 1950’s  pinup-girls sitting in phone booths and a very famous portrait of the Beetles. . But not what I was looking for. So I have chosen instead to go with the image of Figure 1, which shows Alexander Graham Bell himself making the first call from NYC to Chicago in 1881.  There is also I pretty cool recording of Bell experimenting with the telephone from 1885.  As we have discuss in the past everyone one of these communications advances: the telegraph, the telephone, radio, television, represented in its own right an internet. The Lily Tomlin character of the condescending telephone operator, Ernestine, with her plug in network comes to mind as the poster child for the brave new world of internets. “Is this the party with whom I am speaking?”

So I am thinking that I should pay a bit more attention to payphones and antique phones as I encounter them. Evern the “princess phone,” once such a strylistic advance is now an antique. Perhaps a few retrospective and nostalgic photographs are in order, even if they werre disgusting or is it “grody to the max?“