Headin' fer the last dial-up.

Most likely, somewhere in the world right now exists the last coin-operated telephone. No one knows which one it will be. But it's out there.

Didn't make it

The coin-op telephone was invented in 1889 by William Gray of Connecticut, who was angry about having to beg someone to let him use his telephone to call a doctor for his wife. As recently as the 1980s, a friend of mine who worked in sales in Manhattan would spend time between sales calls in the lobbies of some great hotels, where he could be comfortable, organize his materials, and use the banks of public phones in a quiet atmosphere. The hotels liked having young well-dressed businessmen in the lobbies, making the place look dynamic and prosperous. That of course was long before 9/11 and COVID and institutional commie rot and everything else that has made our lives more miserable and more hollow. The last pay phone on a New York City street came down in 2022.

The miraculous cell phone is finally putting paid (ha!) to the coin-op phone, but it had a great run. Where will the last one be? Not in Germany, which in typical European fashion just decided to take all the coin-ops offline at once last year. No phasing out, as in New York. You will stop using the phones NOW! 

How did German payphones survive the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic, when coins were basically garbage? I was unable to find out in the five minutes I devoted to the research. The article notes that Germany's public phones dated to 1881, eight years before Mr. Gray's amazing invention, so perhaps they maintained some other means of paying for calls besides coins through the 1930s.

Well, I believe there's a phone out there somewhere that will be the last coin-op in use, and whether it will succumb to the miracle of modern technology or the same ol' societal collapse that ruins so many things remains to be seen. Considering how addicted we are to our cellies, I'm not optimistic about it as a societal marker regardless.