As a child, I remember that on every street corner, gas station, mall, motel, hotel, building, office, store, there were public phone booths everywhere. You just couldn’t get away from them. People inserted coins and made a call. There was more privacy in those booths when you were talking to someone and no one could hear what you were saying. Now wherever you go, you can listen to people’s conversations wherever they are. I see people talking on the phone while driving, in restaurants, in line to pay, and the list goes on.
In the late 1890s, a man named William Gray invented the payphone. By 1902, there were 81,000 new phone booths in the United States, and that number continued to grow each year to over 200 million by the early 2000s. Many companies that own these payphones continued to raise their prices to catch up with inflation. However, as wireless devices became increasingly popular, payphones began to lose more and more revenue each year.
Pay phones before the 1990s were the only way to connect with others until the cordless phone came along. In the mid-1990s, cell phones began to catch on, and pay phones were finally fading away. Now the number of public telephones is less than 500,000 and is decreasing every year. Some people are affected by this trend because they don’t have a phone or wireless device that they can call someone on.
These low-income residents cannot afford a cell phone or phone service, so they rely on pay phones, which are now becoming a thing of the past. This can be very frustrating for them. I agree that mobile phones are more convenient than other phones because you can take them everywhere. However, with low-income residents, it’s not convenient at all, but rather frustrating because it’s their only form of communication.
Now, more than ever before, cell phones are becoming easier on our lives because we carry them like a computer, pay bills, carry our insurance cards in our phones, keep our contacts on our wireless devices so we don’t have to keep dialing. the same number over and over again. The more additions we get to our wireless devices, the more popular they will become.
Eventually, the payphone will no longer be necessary in our lives as we move faster into the future. We will have wireless devices that can secure our homes and cars when we are not around. In addition, we will not have to travel to attend the meetings; instead, we will be able to connect through our cell phones. Every day there are more and more inventions that will make our lives easier as we move into the age of technology.