Automatic Electric coin telephone - archive photo

Ok, I'm falling down on the job of acquiring new photos. Here's a chromed Citizens/Frontier/GTE/Verizon/General Telephone coin collector made by Automatic Electric. These things are made out of armor. I'm not sure how difficult it is to get chrome to stick to armor. It was impressively clean. The blue grommet on the armored handset cord means the handset is equipped with some kind of hearing aid coupler.

 

I think the carrier was originally General Telephone and Electronics. They changed their name to GTE then Verizon. They sold their wired service to Citizens Utilities (on the coin box). When they decided they didn't want to be in the heavily-regulated wired telephone business, they sold everything to Frontier (top escutcheon). Did I get it right?

 

GTE had a ad campaign where they'd toss out some impressive factoid. The guy on the commercial would say, "Gee!" and the announcer would say, "No, GTE." GTE was notorious for bad service in our area so I morphed this into, "Gee, the phone's dead!" Announcer, "No, GTE."

 

Over half of mankind has never dialed a telephone number. There are more telephone lines in Manhattan than in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa.

— Thabo Mbeki (circa 1995)

 

Half the world dies without ever making or receiving a phone call.

— Scott McNealy (circa 1999)

 

Please do not copy this image.

 

Journalism Grade Image.

 

Source: 4,200x2,800 16-bit TIF file.

Done