Red Telephone Boxes

Gather 'round 21st century children and I'll tell you a story, about an old but now vanished piece of redundant technology...

The lonely red telephone box..icon of the 20th century. Source
Way back in time,  when mobile phones were only a futuristic novelty, when a text message was known simply as 'a letter' and the web was still just a spider's hangout, there used to be a thing called a 'telephone booth'...a strange, enclosed box with pane glass windows that people would occasionally slip into when they were away from home and wanted to make a phone call.

Inside the claustrophobic box was a heavy black and chrome 'public' telephone attached to the wall. This object had what was called a 'dial'  - a circle with holes and numbers inside the holes, where you would stick a finger and turn.  There was a slot where callers would deposit coins before dialling and if no-one was home you could push a button and the coins would tumble noisily down a chute into a little tray where you could retrieve them. Sometimes there'd be an intact big, thick phone directory on a shelf under the phone but other times this would be torn to shreds or missing.

In some countries, such as Australia, these distinctive booths were always painted a bright red, so they could be easily spotted and there were loads of them, on street corners everywhere. The interior was painted a garish, marbled green and sometimes there'd be added decoration, usually in black paint or texta, often with some words inside a love heart, like  "Debbie luvs Don" or  "Brian 4 ever" or maybe something quite rude and obnoxious. Heartbreakingly and much to the frustration of the caller, there'd be times when you'd enter a phone box only to find the chunky black mouthpiece dangling precariously from it's base, having had it's vital line yanked from its base.

In those days in Australia, there was only one phone company and it was owned by the people - run profitably by a government department called the  PMG, which stood for Post Master General. It had responsibility for the postal service and public utilities. However from 1975 the PMG was dismantled and phone and post divided into two separate commissions, which led to the formation of Telstra, (formerly Telecom) a part government/part private merge.. When privatization was introduced, competitors surfaced and in incremental stages, government control of our public utilities was all but relinquished, with the government stake in Telstra now reduced to a limp 10.9%.

With privatization, the unprofitable, public service phone boxes began to disappear, even before mobile use became widespread. 'Excessive vandalism' was cited as one of the reasons for their reduced presence and of course, the eventual increased access to personal phone technologies sealed their fate. I believe there may still be a few remaining booths somewhere but they're a rare sight these days.

The old red telephone booths disappeared even earlier, in Australia at least, having been replaced by modern clear glass boxes with big orange T's for Telstra (or Telecom) on them, sometime in the 80s. Some of them were snapped up at auction and now reside in back yards or in private homes. Despite their complete disappearance form our streets, they still remain an iconic emblem of the 20th century and are fondly remembered by those who are old enough to have used one.

Out with the old, in with the new. A red telephone box graveyard. Source