3 ms·

I wonder how much they chared for a second line back in the 1950's

• yial 8y ago
  I got super curious about this, but it’s very hard to nail down price specifics. In the 1950s, telephones were still leased, right ? I found an article stating yearly phone service in 1979 was $350 a year, including phone lease price. However, I would assume the cost of phone service dropped (not dollar amount, but cost based on inflation). If we assume that the cost stayed the same (which it didn’t) we can use an inflation calculator to see that phone service in 1950 would have been about maybe $100 a year? Which would be about $1020 in today’s dollars. I really have no back up for the accuracy of that however. Long distance calls also seem like a huge monetary amount (as you had to get real operators involved at distance! ) that can throw that calculation into a tizzy.