TELEPHONE TOKEN HISTORY Público Deposited

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  • The E-Sylum: Volume 5, Number 41, October 13, 2002, Article 8

    TELEPHONE TOKEN HISTORY

    To sum up what is known about the Italian Telephone tokens
    we've been discussing, Marco Fiumani writes: "The first official
    Italian telephone tokens appeared on the first half of the 20th
    century and in Italy the STIPEL (Società Telefonica Interregionale
    Piemontese e Lombarda) introduced the first telephone tokens
    to the Fair of Milan in 1927. The experimentation with little
    public phones for city telephone calls that worked with tokens
    with three grooves, of the cost of 60 cts of lira. The success of
    the experiment meant that the public phones multiplied and in
    the succeeding year also the TIMO (Società Telefoni Medio
    Orientale) and the TELVE (Società Telefonica delle Venezie)
    imitated the STIPEL.

    The TETI (Telefonica Tirrena) instead began from 1930 to
    introduce public phones working with coins of 50 cts. In 1935
    also the TETI pass to coin tokens made of aluminum and
    subsequently of zinc of the dimensions of the currency coins
    and without grooves; only during the 1945 the TETI unified
    with the other societies with a token with three grooves.

    The fifth company that coined telephone tokens in Italy was
    the SET (Società Esercizi Telefonici) in the south of Italy.
    The token issued in this period belong to the ?first period?
    of Italian telephone tokens. After a telephonic reform, when
    the monopoly incumbent SIP joined all the previous telephone
    companies, the public phone were standardized and the ESM
    company (Emilio Senesi Medaglie, Milan), began to coin
    regular telephone tokens for all of Italy.

    In August of 1959 the ESM began dating the tokens by
    year and month. Four figures indicate the year and the month
    of coinage. As an example 5909 indicates that the token it was
    coined in September 1959. This kind of token was coined till
    March 1972 with 122 different dates. Those token belong to
    the ?second period?.

    Subsequently, increasing the number of the public phones, also
    the IPM (Industria Politecnica Meridionale in Arzano, Naples),
    CMM (Costruzioni Minuterie Metalliche, Santagata Catania)
    and the UT (Urmet Costruzioni Elettrotelefoniche Turin) began
    to coin the tokens until November 1980, last one coin known
    (IPM 8011). They coined the tokens with the manufacturers'
    logo in addition to the year/month group.

    In the 1970s telephone tokens ended up substituting for
    standard coins of the same 200 lire denomination. In 1972
    one token was manufactured for each Italian; by 1978 there
    were seven tokens produced per head of population.
    Between 1927 and 1980, the year when tokens ceased to
    be manufactured and the first dual-function phonecard/token
    telephones were introduced, a total of around 600 million
    tokens were issued in Italy. On 31 December 2001 the
    telephone token was finally, definitively taken out of circulation.
    It remains a collector's-item for coin collectors and enthusiasts
    alike."

URL da fonte Data de publicação
  • 2002-10-13
Volume
  • 5

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