Wood Telephone Phone Booth Circa 1950's Fan/ Lights Inc Nashville Yellow Pages

Description

~Circa 1950's Phone Booth~
Step back in time too when a nickel got you a three
minute phone call to call home to a loved one or conduct a business transaction.  This beauty is made from hardwoods and
is in excellent condition.
Both the light & fan work which is very unusual for such an old item like this.  Note the yellow pages phone book that is also a great find.
This phone booth resides
amongst an entire building of rare historical antiques, its located in Long Island NY and can be seen in person just about anytime.
A bit about these old finds below,
This phone booth reminded me of old 1940s and 1950s movies, with Cary Grant closed up in one of them, talking to one of his female co-stars or a colleague. Or a newspaper reporter, Graflex camera in his hand, the door open.
By that time, pay phones and phone booths had been around for more than 60 years. What were called pay telephone stations were created way before the pay phones, though, according to
telephonetribute.com
. Dating back to around 1878, they were manned by telephone attendants who accepted payment after the call was completed. According to the website, some attendants would lock patrons in the stations to make sure they wouldn’t abscond without paying.
A fan and motor in the phone booth.
The pay phone was invented by
William Gray
, who had previously improved on the baseball catcher protector and sold it to Spalding. Gray set up the first coin-operated pay phone in a Hartford, CT, bank in 1889. Like the stations, patrons would make their call and pay afterward.
In 1898, Western Electric produced the first prepay phone, which accepted nickels, dimes, quarters and more. Then at the turn of the 20th century, the Bell System installed the first outdoor phone in Cincinnati.
One of the first people to have a phone was
Mark Twain
, who satirized the first phone conversation in an
essay in 1880
and seemed to have blasted the instrument pretty often. President Rutherford B. Hayes had a phone booth
installed outside the Oval Office
in the late 1870s. The phone number was 1, but he didn’t get many calls because not too many people in Washington had phones.
A president would not get a phone in his office until
Herbert Hoover
in 1929.