How do I feed tape from a pay phone?

In the good old days, you could unscrew the mouthpiece cover, remove the mike disc from the phone, and clip on using alligator clips. But apparently the phone companies grew tired of having pieces of their phones go missing, and started sealing the mouthpieces shut.

Nowadays most pay phones are armor-covered to the point where you can't get direct access to the handset wiring or directly to the phone line wire. In these cases you're limited to acoustic coupling, which is a fancy term for holding your headphone or your recorder's built-in loudspeaker close to the phone's handset mouthpiece. Sony's 7504 and 7506 headphones make a pretty good acoustic seal over the mouthpiece which helps keep out some of the ambiant noise.

A few pay phones at select locations like airports and convention hotels now include modular phone jacks for use with laptop computer modems. If you have some way of getting a transformer balanced output from your recorder, you can safely feed audio directly into this jack.