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A coin-operated public telephone, also called a pay phone, hangs on the wall outside the Pascagoula Railroad Depot, April 22, 2021, in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The first pay phone was installed in 1889 in a bank in Hartford, Connecticut. Pay phone calls were only a nickel until the 1950’s, when the price ws increased to a dime. In the 1980’s, pay phones were standardized at a quarter. At their peak, there were 2.6 million payphones in the United States, but numbers began to decline in 2000, as cellular phones became more prevalent and companies like AT&T and Verizon left the payphone business. In 2018, only 100,000 payphones remained in the U.S. The Pascagoula Railroad Depot’s payphone is owned by ETS Payphones, which was founded by Atlanta entrepreneur Charles Edwards. In 2006, Edwards was sentenced to 13 years in prison on charges of wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. (Photo by Carmen K. Sisson/Cloudybright)
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2021 Carmen K. Sisson/Cloudybright
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Pascagoula, Mississippi
A coin-operated public telephone, also called a pay phone, hangs on the wall outside the Pascagoula Railroad Depot, April 22, 2021, in Pascagoula, Mississippi. The first pay phone was installed in 1889 in a bank in Hartford, Connecticut. Pay phone calls were only a nickel until the 1950’s, when the price ws increased to a dime. In the 1980’s, pay phones were standardized at a quarter. At their peak, there were 2.6 million payphones in the United States, but numbers began to decline in 2000, as cellular phones became more prevalent and companies like AT&T and Verizon left the payphone business. In 2018, only 100,000 payphones remained in the U.S. The Pascagoula Railroad Depot’s payphone is owned by ETS Payphones, which was founded by Atlanta entrepreneur Charles Edwards. In 2006, Edwards was sentenced to 13 years in prison on charges of wire fraud, money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. (Photo by Carmen K. Sisson/Cloudybright)