CURIOSITIES:WHEN DID YOU last use a payphone? Thought so. Bet you don't even know where your nearest public callbox is either. In that case, you've just confirmed a recent EU survey which found that more than three-quarters of us never use payphones now, writes Mary Mulvihill.
So, spare a thought for a lonesome callbox located under the shade of a tree, on the east side of Dublin's Dawson Street. This unprepossessing cabinet is Ireland's oldest, one of the city's original phone boxes first erected in 1925. Ushering in the era of the public phone call, these callboxes made telephone technology available to the person in the street.
The Dawson Street box now houses a modern phone, and the notice detailing its history fell off some years back, but the design is a giveaway: this is a robust piece of early 20th-century public architecture, exuding a certain status, and built to last.
Public phones were once so important they were marked on Ordnance Survey maps. Those were the days when everyone knew the location of their nearest callbox and made sure to carry enough change for an emergency call home.
Coincidentally, Dawson Street can also claim Ireland's first telephone line: installed in January 1878, within two years of Alexander Graham Bell's first "call", the line connected Maguire's hardware store on Dawson Street directly to the Gresham Hotel on O'Connell Street, and both companies invited customers to witness the spectacle of the newfangled device.
Within a year, switching exchanges had been developed, so subscribers could call each other. But for decades, the telephone would remain the preserve of the rich, and reserved for the head of the household.
Hard to believe now but, until the first transatlantic phone cable was laid in 1956, the only way to communicate with the US was by telegram, radio or post.
Today, we take personal mobile phones for granted and no longer marvel at a technology that can locate us with pinpoint accuracy and transmit our voices faithfully over thousands of miles.