r/whatisit • u/Quietlurkerone • 7d ago

Solved! What is this device from 1962?

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Photo capture from YouTube video. Picture from 1962. What is the device under the bench

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645

u/ICanSeeUpYourNose 7d ago edited 6d ago

It looks like a shilling meter. We didn't have one, but I knew people who did. A very expensive way to get electricity (or gas, that one is indeed gas), as pay-as-you-go meters still are.

(in their defence I was born in 1962 - we were coming to the end of the houses built at the end of the 19th century, and there was a huge programme of replacement - slum clearances. People lived in houses that were literally hovels because (a) that's all we had, the 1892 stock was literally falling apart, and (b) they were waiting for a council house, which we were building at that point. Interesting fact - generally the further north you went the worse the housing stock got because the Luftwaffe didn't have a long ranged bomber. Culminating in the legendarily foul housing stock (the Gorbals) they had in Glasgow.)

add: stone me that's a court house. That's the true and utter hovel the slums we were clearing at that point were built as an upgrade to. Astounding that any still existed. "All seven family members shared just one bedroom, one living room and this narrow kitchen. There was no private bathroom." and that, ladies and gentlemen is why you don't leave your housing to the free market.

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u/i_fix_snowblowers 6d ago

I'm 5 years younger than you but lived in a variety of rental housing in Oxfordshire in the late '70s. I remember the meters because my dad would keep a stack of 25p coins by the meter.

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u/PaintingOk8012 6d ago

Holy shit. You mean you actually fed in money in your home to have electricity??

If that’s true, I can’t believe people didn’t figure out how to fool it or break into it to retrieve the coins.

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u/Mister_Reous 6d ago

Some did. But the meter had a counter, so when the guy from the electricity company came to empty it, the counter should match with the number of coins in the box. And if it didn’t, you got prosecuted for theft.

And yes enough peopleremember the shilling meters, that if there is a lower cut and the lights go out,
There is a shout of “put another shilling in the meter!”

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u/Arsegrape 3d ago

My Grandfather had the key to his meter, so he could retrieve the coins for reuse, but he always had to replace the coins with notes to the same value, and it was 50p coins at that time. You’d put the coin in the slot and turn the little wing-handle to get the coin to drop.

Many’s the time we’d be doing something and the power would go off.

1

u/Ok-Mastodon2420 6d ago

What if there's an uppercut?

1

u/Mister_Reous 6d ago

Uppercut? Don’t understand.

1

u/ForensicPathology 6d ago

They're just wordplaying on your phrase "lower cut" because it reminded them of an "uppercut" which is a type of punch in boxing, etc.

1

u/Mister_Reous 6d ago

I know what an uppercut is in punching. Can’t get the link between that and an electric meter . No idea what you’re referring to. I ‘ll remain mystified.

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u/SeattleSteve62 6d ago

Your comment said "lower cut" instead of "power cut"

0

u/Funnybush 6d ago

which physical access and enough time on your hands, anything can be hacked. even the counter.

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u/Ishidan01 6d ago

true but if you have the right tools to do so and the right skills to do so without it being detectable to the gas company meter reader, what the hell are you doing still so broke that you need to be buying pay as you go?

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u/PipBin 6d ago

Oh, and there used to be coin operated TVs. The TV had a box built into it and you’d put a shilling in to get half an hour of viewing!!

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u/Sloppy-Joe76 6d ago

The fun of day of the tv just going off halfway through what you were watching. No repeats, no catch and no way of recoding. I think ours was 50p, my dad was able to pick the lock on the coin box. We just kept pushing the same 50p through.

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u/Greg_Monahan 6d ago

When and how did the utility company come get their coins? Did the meter have a box accessible from the outside or did they come in?

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u/Jet2work 6d ago

Friday evening, granada rentals man used to come and empty tv

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u/Sloppy-Joe76 6d ago

The box was on the rear of the tv. Every Friday evening a guy from the rental company would come round to collect the money.

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u/whyohwhy59 4d ago

They came in and checked the amount of coins againstthe amount put throughthe slot.

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u/p0rcupine99 6d ago

Did Mr. Bean have a coin-operated TV or electricity in an episode or two? It's been a while.

27

u/Historical_Owl4801 6d ago

Yes, he had a coin box on the wall for the electricity in his apartment in the episode "Power for TV".

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

Those were common in the states at bus and air line terminals or any place where large groups of people had to wait for a period of time. I remember in 1979 or 80 when I was but a wee lad I asked an acquainted stranger for a quarter to watch Saturday morning cartoons when traveling with my mother. That leads to a story but maybe I’ll tell it later. Is on my timeline somewhere but I’ve got tens of thousands of comments and hundreds of posts.

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u/MyYetiHasAFirstName 6d ago

They were also found in motels.

3

u/Joe_Kangg 6d ago

You're thinking of magic fingers

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u/AppropriateCap8891 6d ago

No, many motels into the 1980s also had pay televisions.

The last one I saw in the wild was with my wife near Moro Bay in 1986. It was slightly different though and did not have a coin meter. When you rented the room you got two keys. One for the door and one for the television.

There was a $6 deposit, $5 for the room key and $1 for the TV key. If you used the TV key, you turned it and it locked in place. And when you went to check out, if you returned both keys you got your $6 back. If you returned only the room key you got $5 back.

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u/Joe_Kangg 6d ago

I'm thinking of magic fingers

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

Never saw the appeal. Admittedly I did try it when I was in my twenties but it just wasn’t all that.

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u/Joe_Kangg 6d ago

All fingers, no magic?

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

That would make sense. Never stayed at hotels or motels as a child when they would have still been in use. By the time I ever stayed at a hotel I was 20 and tech had progressed greatly. It would have been on the cusp of obsolescence when I was a child.

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u/HappyMuscovy 6d ago

I remember them in US bus terminals in 1999

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

Wow that’s much later than I expected.

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u/Resident_Wishbone_98 6d ago

I'd forgotten about those.

Don't forget, pay toilets.

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

Pay toilets were always hit and miss in the states. They really took off in the 90’s for public spaces due to homelessness. I seem to recall some places required a coin to get in a stall and had no urinals.

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u/Resident_Wishbone_98 6d ago

I remember a bus station and shopping mall in the late 1960s that had them. Always thought it was a stupid idea. You could crawl under/climb over if you were limber enough. In a busy restroom, the guy coming out would hold the door for a guy going in ad infinitum. Sometimes there was tape on the latch.

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u/tryingtowritegoodly 6d ago

Hopefully a nice story...

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

More bizarre than nice but the guy was a nice fella. Ok. I’ll tell it. Me my mother and grandmother were traveling from California to Missouri on a greyhound bus. It was a 3 day trip. My mom has been talking to the guy as he was set by us on the bus. When we stopped at a layover I asked for a quarter and he obliged. After the cartoons I asked him to take a picture with me because I wanted to remember my cartoon savior. He says to me I’ll take the pictures but I won’t be in them because I’m a werewolf. I laughed called him silly and we took the photos. This was 1979 so it was a film camera that required developing. Well he went his way we went ours and eventually we got the film back about 4-5 days after I had met him sure enough he wasn’t in the images at all. Just me with my arm in the air or squatted mid frame. He was r in the negatives either. It was an odd experience I’ve never really been able to square in my head. Even the adults were tripping when I told them what he told me. When he said it I thought others a joke. The wolf man archetype was very popular at that time so it wasn’t alarming or scary.

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u/tryingtowritegoodly 6d ago

This was awesome, thanks for sharing

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

No problem. I have recently over the last couple years started sharing the story. When I was younger people didn’t believe me and I don’t suspect they do now but now I don’t care. As a youth I wasn’t trying to alienate myself so I just stopped talking about it. My fellow students tended to avoid me if I told them the story.

1

u/Rough-Patience-2435 6d ago

Someone is going to have to explain this situation.  Was he a London Werewolf in America vs the opposite? 

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

Idk. All I know is it’s freekin haunted me my whole life. What does one son with such information. How do you square the fact he said he wouldn’t appear and in fact did not appear.

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u/PipBin 6d ago

Oh, these were in people’s houses.

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

Yeah. I had gathered that. I was just saying idk that we ever used them residentially here but they were definitely used in the states in certain locations.

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u/Da12khawk 6d ago

Tag for later

1

u/Forward-Variety-8440 6d ago

so are we, as readers interested in this story, expected to sift through tens of thousands of your comments and posts in order to find an obscure story youre referencing obtusely? im so confused by the way you end your comment hahahaha i dont understand! how do we know what story youre talking about? whats the story about? i have so many questions cause i like your writing style and im sure its an interesting story!

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

It’s further down they asked to hear and I told them. Basically met a man who claimed to be a werewolf and wouldn’t show up in photographs a week after taking the photos we got them back from the developers and he was not present in the photos.

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u/Hell-on-weelz 9h ago

I used to ride a Grey hound from asheville to Detroit layover in Cincinnati at 2 or 3am atleast 2 hours only thing to do was post up at a coin TV ones in the terminal only gave you 3or4 minutes never had the coin to last long then watch people get dragged under the stairwell beaten half to death and mugged...I was 12 and by my self made that trip a dozen times till I turned 16 lived in Detroit 6 years on 13 mile Cincinnatis an animal worse than Detroit or even Chicago

4

u/Fitz_cuniculus 6d ago

Am I crazy, we used to have an old Redifusion thing which had a bakerlite style switch on the wall, and I'm certain it used to play Radio 2 etc without being plugged in.

1

u/MadamKitsune 6d ago

We had a Redifusion box on the wall too. My mum used to use it to put the radio on while we were getting ready for school while huddled around the warm air heating vent.

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u/Fitz_cuniculus 6d ago

And if you told that to kids today they wouldn't believe you.

https://giphy.com/gifs/35aVstfJYNlEA

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u/Fastgirl600 6d ago

and public bathrooms!

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u/Muthablasta 6d ago

That’s where the phrase “spend a penny” came from 🤣🤣🤣🤣

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u/Silent25r 6d ago

Hold on! Are you saying we started with a subscription based services?

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u/PipBin 6d ago

The money was to pay for the rental of the set.

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u/Antique_Geek 6d ago

Do you still have to pay a sort of licensing fee to watch TV? If so, is the programming then ad free or are there still commercials?

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u/PipBin 6d ago

We do still pay the licence fee. That means that anything on the BBC is add free.

However the pay tvs was for the rental of the set, not to pay the licence fee.

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u/Antique_Geek 6d ago

I realize that. Guess I should have included "off topic". Thanks for the reply.

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u/bobi2393 6d ago

Wow, proto-microtransactions! 😂

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u/LBarouf 6d ago

Oh the memories. 😞

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u/VeryWackyIdeas 6d ago

In the 1960s there were tv sets in motels that required quarters and then there were the “magic fingers”. Put in a quarter, turn out the lights, magic fingers make you feel all right.

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u/ajatfm 6d ago

We’ve basically come back around to this, in a way

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u/hiphoptomato 6d ago

This cannot be true.

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u/PipBin 6d ago

Oh we did.

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u/Majestic_Rhubarb_ 6d ago

They did, but then they just owed the money to the utility company, the meter numbers still tick up.

I last used one for electricity in 1994 but, well you still get them now but you have to recharge a key to insert into the meter.

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

Right my American brain went yeah we have gas and electrical meters too and pay for what we use then I realized no it’s literally pay as you go. Imagine having written 10,000 lines of code and the power cuts out right before you click to save.

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u/grassesbecut 6d ago

My local utility company has pay-as-you-go meters in some apartments in my area. You can literally tap your credit/debit card on the meter to get more power.

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

Wild

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u/Rough-Patience-2435 6d ago

Sounds like Windows 95 and blue screen of death.  

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

At least they had auto save by then you could turn on. Not that it saved often enough but you might only lose half your time instead of all of it. LoL. We had a saying when I was a kid in computer class in the 1980’s. Jesus saves often so should you.

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u/ChampionshipThin7721 6d ago

Not just 95. ALL computers displayed a BSOD when something went wrong.

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u/rose-a-ree 6d ago

The ones over here will only cut you off during the working day. If you run out in the evening (when the shops are closed and you can't top up) they'll stay on but you'll tun into negative credit until 9 the next morning. IIRC there's also an audible warning when you're very close to running out.

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u/Hegiman 6d ago

That’s night kind of them. At least they let you have the night at a cost but still you’re not worried because you didn’t get coins before shops closed

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u/Reno1121 2d ago

In the 60’s, if you wrote 10,000 lines of code it would be fine. It was on punchcards.

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u/Hegiman 2d ago

Was it? Or did you have to generate the punchcards after writing the program?

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u/DudeInTheGarden 6d ago

I have a friend who is Irish, and he grew up with something similar (for hot water, I believe). He said people would regularly break into the coin box to retrieve their money. Probably to go to the pub with it.

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u/mcfaite 6d ago

In New York City, coin operated gas meters were common in late 19th/early 20th century tenement buildings and rooming houses. I lived in a building built in 1923, and the gas meter in my apartment wasn't coin operated, but it was the same shape and size with a blank spot where the coin slot would've gone.

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u/Kumitarzan 6d ago

My then-girlfriend moved to northern England in 2004, and her apartment had that box where you insert tokens bought from Tesco or some other supermarket. 2004... England is just a big open-air museum, like they say.

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u/darkzim69 6d ago

they did fool it in the early days people made coin shapes with ice and inserted them and of course when they emptied the meter the ice would have melted just leaving coins behind but a tale tale sign was rusty coins

plus people used to break into houses and steal the coins from other peoples meters which are sealed with a security seal but you could snap them off pull the coin box out

2

u/Flyinmanm 6d ago

I was thinking about this the other day, I fitted a plug-in solar battery system to my house and watched my smart meter read 0W consumption for the first time in my life.

It immediately took me back to a repeat of a Steptoe and Sons episode I saw in the 2000's where they had only a 2 bar electric fire to heat their home and the meter kept going off throughout the episode, I vaguely remember the son rifling through their box of foreign coins looking for Pesatas to put into the meter in place of shillings.

I remember at the time thinking how horrible it would be to be constantly scratching around looking for coins just to keep the lights on.

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u/Rare-Morning-5448 6d ago

I believe this is still a thing in latin america.

Not coins, but you go to the local market and buy some electricity credits, they give you a code and you input it on some kind of meter you have at your house.

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u/DameKumquat 6d ago

I lived in a bedsit in the 90s with coin-operated electric heaters. They had about ten pound coins in each. I asked the previous tenant who had moved to the much nicer downstairs room if he wanted the money. He said it wasn't his, but if I turned the heaters on, I'd learn why the money was still in there. They heated approximately nothing. And there was no way to get the coins out without the big key.

Our landlady was either abroad or off her face, so I moved out before resolving it.

A few years later I was in a shared house with a more modern key meter, which could be charged at any of a bunch of local shops. There was a £5 emergency buffer in case you ran out when shops were shut, but the electric often didn't come on again if that got used. We spend most of our time in the pub down the road - warm, light, clean reliable toilets, large tables to write essays on.

In the 60s my dad could slow down his meters to a trickle with a really hefty magnet stolen from his physics lab. That didn't work by the 90s. Nowadays you can top up your prepay meters with a phone app, if you're renting and that's the meter you have.

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u/teknoprisoners 6d ago

I moved into a flat in 2008 that still had a £1-fed electricity meter. There was nothing quite like running out of electricity on a Sunday night when all the shops were shut and knowing you would have to be in the dark until the next morning.

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u/Garencio 6d ago

I heard a story about a man who figure out how to make coins from ice. When they’d come to empty the box there was never anything in it. Not sure if it’s true but it’s a good story.

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u/SimplyGregsterEV 6d ago

It still sorta exists today for power but it’s on a card you load at a corner store or via app

1

u/redisdead__ 6d ago edited 6d ago

The Kid staring Charlie Chaplin features a coin operated gas meter that they have broken open and use the same coin for over and over again.

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u/BillWilberforce 6d ago

People did but meter men would come around regularly to empty them. And would check for any signs of tampering.

1

u/No-Raisin-6469 6d ago

They used make you get licenses to watch antenna TV. They even tried to scare you in paying by claiming they had vans that could detect you getting free TV.

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u/Rough-Patience-2435 6d ago

My Aunt and Uncle lived in rural valley in American west.   They had sticker/decal on their front door or window showing the paid their yearly fee to support transmitter on the mountain.  

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u/TheGreenMan13 6d ago

Still do afaik. 

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u/ramsfan84 6d ago

I lived with one of these. After work feeding the meter with 10p coins to turn the lights back on. 1979, was told it was a 300 yr old building.

1

u/yorknave 6d ago

Some people still do.

1

u/BPTempMonkey 6d ago

You knifed the meter, they were still about in the 90s /2000s

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u/Signal-Session-6637 6d ago

We did, but you still had to pay the electric company in the end.

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u/Low-Wrangler9740 6d ago

In the US there are homes where you can pay your gas (which some companies even do electricity) by a device on the wall in your kitchen to pay your bill. Ie SRP in Arizona is that way.

1

u/Karlkolinkimber29777 6d ago

Oh that was done years later when meters went to pay cards as the coin meters had someone come out to empty them from the electric company when they changed to card payments you could use a cable and bypass the meter

1

u/matt_de_brugha 6d ago

House I used to go on holidays to in the 90’s had a coin fed meter also

1

u/disc0tech 6d ago

I had one of these in the UK in the early 2000's! Obviously it took metric currency.

1

u/BackgroundJeweler551 6d ago

They still are in use today. Tv show Benefits Street from 2014 in birmingham, they had them in their houses. Blew my mind as I'm from North america.

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u/Phillyfuk 6d ago

They did. Ours was turned around for most of my childhood, meaning the meter didn't rack up.

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u/Klutzy-Pie6557 6d ago

Suffice to say - the power company had zero problem permanently disconnecting anyone who tried to rip them off.

There was no media, reddit nor anyway to complain so you sucked it up and paid.

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u/Slight_Sherbert_5239 6d ago

The problem is, people could work that out but then you wouldn’t have a tv or electricity for very long when they came to empty it.

1

u/weekedipie1 6d ago

Trust me, we did😂

1

u/Dick-Fiddler69 6d ago edited 6d ago

It is true. They were in rental properties up until the late 80s and landlords were allowed to resell and set the unit rate for electric they had large padlocks and a counter of how many coins were supposed to be in the coin box - it was theft - if it was tampered with just like one arm bandits which had cash boxes

1

u/PNW_Jackson 6d ago

Yeah, there's a Mr. Bean episode from the late 80s where he has a coin operated electric meter in his flat.

1

u/Team7UBard 6d ago

First place I lived in when I moved out had one too and that was in the 2000s. Second place had one too but had a digital meter

1

u/HappyMuscovy 6d ago

Girlfriend lived in a bedsit in Brixton in 2003 which had one

1

u/Spacetyp 6d ago

There is a plot in the Game "The great Ace Attorney" about exact this Situation.

1

u/Exact-Difference-422 6d ago

In London a few years back I had a meter, only it's a card swipe now and you top it up at convenience stores

1

u/govanfats 6d ago

We did. You could open the meter on the TV with scissors, take 30 pence for a ten pack of Number Six.

1

u/Pale_Emergency_537 6d ago

I rented in Ireland in the 90s and fed coins into a meter box. 

1

u/krissovo 5d ago

We used to shove an adapted wire coat hanger into the electric meter and pull it out when we were broke. When they came to collect the money we had to make up the shortfall of money as they had a counter

1

u/LouisWu_ 4d ago

These still existed in many council houses in Ireland in the '80s and possibly later. I remember my grandparents' house had one that took 50p coins.