Telephone tokens were

token coin In numismatics, token coins or trade tokens are coin-like objects used instead of coins. The field of token coins is part of exonumia and token coins are token money. Their denomination is shown or implied by size, color or shape. They are o ...

s once widely used for making telephone calls from public telephones in place of ordinary coins. They were also sometimes used as a medium of exchange and as a collectible. Telephone tokens were once widely used in

Europe Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a Continent#Subcontinents, subcontinent of Eurasia ...

Israel Israel (; he, יִשְׂרָאֵל, ; ar, إِسْرَائِيل, ), officially the State of Israel ( he, מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, label=none, translit=Medīnat Yīsrāʾēl; ), is a country in Western Asia. It is situated ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

, and

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the sou ...

, but have since been largely superseded by

telephone card A telephone card, calling card or phonecard for short, is a credit card-size plastic or paper card, used to pay for telephone services (often international or long-distance calling). It is not necessary to have the physical card except with a st ...

s and

credit card A credit card is a payment card issued to users (cardholders) to enable the cardholder to pay a merchant for goods and services based on the cardholder's accrued debt (i.e., promise to the card issuer to pay them for the amounts plus the ...

s. They were introduced during inflationary periods to avoid having to frequently change the coin slots on pay phones.

History

Phone tokens started in

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = List of sovereign states, Count ...

, in the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

, where public phones would accept only tokens. Tokens were used in the U.S. until 1944, when they were eliminated and most of the tokens were melted down to make shell casings. The earliest-known telephone token dates from 1885, when it was produced for the PAN

Telephone Company A telephone company, also known as a telco, telephone service provider, or telecommunications operator, is a kind of communications service provider (CSP), more precisely a telecommunications service provider (TSP), that provides telecommunicat ...

in St. Louis, Missouri. Rather than being deposited in the phone, the token was sometimes given to an attendant or placed in a

coin A coin is a small, flat (usually depending on the country or value), round piece of metal or plastic used primarily as a medium of exchange or legal tender. They are standardized in weight, and produced in large quantities at a mint in order ...

box to gain access to the phone booth. The practice of using tokens and allowing their specific value to float with the going rate for a phone call eventually became the standard world-wide practice. This came in especially handy in European countries where currencies changed as one crossed national borders, but a token could still be used. It was also the practice for some restaurants to have their own tokens so that those bought at a different place could not be used at that business. In some countries, such as Italy, they were even used informally as cash equivalents. While most telephone tokens are round, some have different shapes as well.

References

{{Commonscat, Telephone tokens *Groenendijk, Henk A.: ''A Catalog of Telephone and Telegraph Tokens of the World''. Leiden 1989. *Targonsky, Paul: ''A Catalogue of Telephone Tokens of the World''. Published by the author. Meriden, Conn., 1968 *van Dam, Rik: A Catalogue of Telephone Tokens of the World''. A catalog in progress, started in 2016. www.telephonetokens.com Telephone services Telecommunications economics

History

See also

References