The installation of the first public telephone booth dates back to February 10, 1952, right in Milan, in the central Piazza San Babila, at the initiative of the concessionaire Stipel. The structure of this booth was made of metal and glass, materials with which its “lesser” little sisters were also made over the following decades…
Previously, public telephones were exclusively installed in public establishments, such as bars, newsstands, places open to the public, or in Public Telephone Posts (PTPs). In Italy, telephone booths have housed different types of telephone equipment over time: from disc dialer telephones with number dialing analogous to the S62“Bigrigio” model, to the first keypad telephones, then to the “Rotor” device, in operation since 1987, then in 1998 to the“Tuo,” a red only card model with a black handset. And finally to the “Digito” model in operation since 2002, still present in active booths.
During the 1970s, telephone booths became commonplace in the Italian urban landscape. By 1971, over two thousand booths were installed in Italy, while by the end of the decade, the number of booths amounted to over thirty-three thousand. The public telephone was now widely used on the streets of the Bel Paese. In 1976, the first prepaid phone cards were used on an experimental basis, which then became collector’s items in the years to come.
Who knows today this phone booth, which precisely in Milan found its first home, how it would be looked at by our sophisticated cell phones, “smart” more than ever, skilled in computing capacity, memory, able to take photos and shoot videos and, between non-stop chats and “video calls,” now become the main channels of communication between us, locked in our homes, and that outside that will still be precluded to us for a while in this much suspended time.
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