A pay toilet is a public toilet that requires the user to pay. It may be street furniture or be inside a building, e.g. a shopping mall, department store, or railway station. The reason for charging money is usually for the maintenance of the equipment. Paying to use a toilet can be traced back almost 2000 years, to the first century BCE. The charge is often collected by an attendant or by inserting coins into an automatic turnstile; in some freestanding toilets in the street, the fee is inserted into a slot by the door. Mechanical coin operated locks are also used. Some more high tech toilets accept card or contactless payments. Sometimes, a token can be used to enter a pay toilet without paying the charge. Some municipalities offer these tokens to residents with disabilities so these groups aren't discriminated against by the pay toilet. Some establishments such as cafés and restaurants offer tokens to their customers so they can use the toilets for free but other users must pay the relevant charge.
- ⭐ Core Definition: Pay toilet
- Pay toilet in the context of John Nevil Maskelyne
- Pay toilet in the context of Turnstile
Pay toilet in the context of John Nevil Maskelyne
John Nevil Maskelyne (22 December 1839 – 18 May 1917) was an English stage magician and inventor of the pay toilet, along with other Victorian-era devices. He worked with magicians George Alfred Cooke and David Devant, and many of his illusions are still performed today. His book Sharps and Flats: A Complete Revelation of the Secrets of Cheating at Games of Chance and Skill is considered a classic overview of card sharp practices. In 1914 he founded the Occult Committee, a group to "investigate claims to supernatural power and to expose fraud".
View the full Wikipedia page for John Nevil MaskelynePay toilet in the context of Turnstile
A turnstile (also called a gateline, baffle gate, automated gate, turn gate in some regions) is a form of gate which allows one person to pass at a time. A turnstile can be configured to enforce one-way human traffic. In addition, a turnstile can restrict passage only to people who insert a coin, ticket, transit pass, security credential, or other method of payment or verification. Modern turnstiles can incorporate biometrics, including retina scanning, fingerprints, and other individual human characteristics which can be scanned.
A turnstile can be used in the case of paid access (sometimes called a faregate or ticket barrier when used for this purpose), for example to access public transport, a pay toilet, or to restrict access to authorized people, for example in the lobby of an office building.
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