On August 13, 1889, one William Gray, perhaps Hartford, Connecticut’s greatest inventor (I’m not sure there is much competition) received a patent from the U.S. Patent Office for the first coin-operated telephone. Way to go science and way to go William Gray, however, the Guffaw has no doubts that Mr. Gray is looking down from Heaven or Valhalla or wherever the great sons of the Nutmeg State go after this life and is like, “really, that is my legacy?”

No doubt this antique works better than the Guffaw's Droid...

The payphone, a relic of simpler times, when a phone had a chord and required one to dial “1” to call anywhere that was further than next door. Since 1889, Mr. Gray’s invention and the subsequent corralling of this invention into a phone booth, has evolved into a depository for old chewing gum and human fluids from urine to vomit and everything in between. The invention of the pay phone eventually inspired one of the worst movies the Guffaw staff as ever seen, Phone Booth, starring Colin Farrell, Kiefer Sutherland, the Queen of Scientology Katie Holmes and the original “left-eye,” Forrest Whitaker. Sutherland plays a deadly assassin who decides he wants to teach a third-rate con-man (Farrell) about the value of life and so on by making him use nearly $400 in quarters in a New York City phone booth or something. It just makes no sense. I mean, I am sure that deadly psychotic assassins have better things to do, like invent ice-bullets to kill heads of state or finish chapter 836 of their manifesto.

Back to William Gray, he put his first “coin phone” in a bank in Hartford. It operated by allowing one to make the call first, and then required payment with coins. It was probably only after the first call or two that Mr. Gray decided to go payment first then call. Mr. Gray also invented the first inflatable chest protector for baseball catchers and umpires. The inflatable chest protector, even after a doubleheader in mid-July, is likely more sanitary than a public phone.