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Telephone Tokens: The Forerunner of the Telephone Card

by Christopher Batio for the January 10, 1995 issue of Numismatic Review. All rights reserved to Numismatic Review.

Before there were telephone cards to collect and use, telephone tokens were a widespread medium of exchange for people wanting to talk with someone across the ocean or across the street.

These brass nickel-sized tokens were once widely used in Europe, Japan, and South America, and are still used today in places such as Turkey, Hungary, and Israel.

Israel phone tokens, showing a telephone dial on the front

Ironically, it was the United States, and especially Chicago, where phone tokens got their start. Phones that would accept only tokens were legal in the U.S. until 1944. Then they were eliminated and most of the tokens were melted down to make shell casings.

According to avid telephone token collector Robert Lusch of Monroe, Michigan, the earliest-known telephone token dates from 1885, when it was produced for the PAN Telephone Company in Saint Louis. Missouri. Rather than being deposited in the phone, the token was given to an attendant or placed in a coin box to gain access to the phone booth.

The first token that was actually deposited in a phone appeared in the 1890's. It was produced for the Sunset Telephone and Telegraph Company in California. The brass token bore the company name and the value, "Good for One Switch."

This practice of using tokens activators 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 once you crossed borders, but a token could still be useful.

The first major evolution in telephone tokens occurred in 1907 when a Chicago druggist named Henry Goetz patented a round token with a cut in it running from the center to the edge. The token could only be used in machines with an attachment over the coin slot that admitted tokens of the same shop.

This innovation came about mainly because store owners throughout Chicago Telephone Company did not sell tokens, individual shopkeepers and tavern owners did.

At the end of each week the phone company would send someone around to empty out each phone's token box. The shopkeeper would have to reimburse the company for the 77.5 percent of the activations that occurred, whether they were performed with a legitimate token or a slug. He kept the rest for himself. This practice was instituted in 1901 after the Chicago Telephone Company was cheated out of $110,000 worth of phone calls by slugs.

Obviously, the businessmen whose phones were plagued with slugs were losing money and welcomed the new Goetz system. The tokens and the restrictive attachments were manufactured by the Yale Shot and Slug Co. of Chicago, and soon they were on every pay phone in the city.

The tokens helped cutback on the use of slugs, but innovative thieves were soon cutting slots into their worthless lead discs and the troubles started all over again. To combat this "counterfeit" token threat, Goetz kept coming up with more and more intricately cut tokens, and eventually adding grooves and eventually using grooves. Although Goetz-type tokens were used only in Chicago, other phone tokens were used in some areas of the country.

Lusch sold he has tokens from Iowa, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan in his collection. He also owns phone tokens that were produced for school boards, sheriffs departments and newspapers to be given to employees in case they had to use a pay- phone while on the job.

Foreign tokens offer an interesting contrast to U.S. phone tokens in that they are still being produced in many countries, and often the issuer is the government itself. Most of them have taken the form of round tokens cut with alternating grooves, such as one on the reverse, and two on the obverse.

Italian phone tokens

Many European tokens also have a small stamp on them indicating the month and year of issue. For example, one labeled "7006" would have been issued in June 1976.

Telephone tokens are relatively inexpensive despite the fact that some are very rare. This is mainly because they are not a very popular collectible.

For years, Lusch and other collectors like him have been hoping to find the Rosetta stone of Goetz tokens --the records showing which stores were issued which tokens. This information has never been found and makes the Chicago tokens almost impossible to attribute.

Only one person has ever tried to produce a catalog of telephone tokens. In l968 Paul Targonsky of Meriden, Connecticut produced 300 mimeograph copies of Catalog of Telephone Tokens of the World. Those copies have since been scattered to the four winds.

Without a-new cataloging effort the small hobby of telephone token collecting may die out, especially since telephone cards are gradually replacing the tokens.

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J.R. Snyder Jr. (internal link) adds:

The piece on telephone tokens was interesting. I vaguely remember as a kid in the very early 60's some type of tokens were used in Britain. I'd have to think about it but I believe that pubs sold the tokens to use their phones for those in the rural areas who didn't have phones. The reason for the tokens was a BT regulatory requirement, because the tokens were used inexchange for placing a call on a business line, not a British Telephone "pay box."

Privateline.com's Telephone History Series

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