Wiki reasearch

Some of the reasearch that went into making my radio show:

Question of when payphones came about:
Pay phones were preceded by pay stations, manned by telephone company attendants who would collect payment for calls placed. In 1889, the first public coin telephone was invented by William Gray and installed at a bank in Hartford, Connecticut. The invention quickly caught on, and by 1902, there were 81,000 pay phones in the United States. By 1905, the first outdoor pay phones with booths were installed. By the end of 1925, 25,000 of these booths existed in New York City alone. In 1960, the Bell System installed its one millionth telephone booth. After the divestiture of Pacific Bell (California) and AT&T in 1981, it wasn't long before independent stores selling telephones opened up. After that privately owned payphones hit the market. Unfortunately due to excessive vandalism, this market struggled.