Bar Blocks Phone Signal To Force People To Talk To Each Other
[Image: Getty]
Ever been on a date with someone who can’t stop browsing Facebook, flicking through Snapchat or, God forbid, swiping on Tinder?
Then you’ll know the agonies of being ‘phubbed’, that’s phone snubbed for those who aren’t in the know.
Now one bar is waging war against phubbing in a really, really old fashioned way.
Steve Tyler, who runs The Gin Tub in Hove, was sick of seeing people glued to their iPhones rather than having a chat, so he decided to use 19th century technology to make phones useless in his bar.
Steve created a Faraday cage, a tin box that blocks electrical fields, invented in 1836 by physicist Michael Faraday. Creating a traditional Faraday cage means lining walls with metal foil and wire mesh, but Steve used silver and copper.
Michael Faraday [Photo: Getty]
“It’s not the perfect system, it’s not military grade,” he told Sky News. “The Americans are still listening.
“But the general public get poor signal or no signal, so they have to go outside to use their phones. That’s what I want them to do. I want them to talk to the people they’re with, not the people they’re not with.”
A more effective way of blocking phone signal is to what are called ‘jammers’ but, fortunately for those of us in an exclusive relationship with our smartphones, this tech is illegal in the UK.
Steve has had no complaints about the bar’s policy so far, except from one customer whose phone was, to their disappointment, still working.
Would you go to a phone-free bar? Tweet us at @YahooStyleUK
