Bar In UK Uses Faraday Cage To Block Mobile Phone Signals (telegraph.co.uk)

Reader Bruce66423 writes: A cocktail bar owner has installed a Faraday cage in his walls to prevent mobile phone signals entering the building. Steve Tyler of the Gin Tub, in Hove, East Sussex, is hoping customers will be encouraged to talk to each other rather than looking at their screens. He has installed metal mesh in the walls and ceiling of the bar which absorbs and redistributes the electromagnetic signals from phones and wireless devices to prevent them entering the interior of the building. The effect was discovered in 1836 by scientist Michael Faraday and is often used in power plants or other highly charged environments to prevent shocks or interference with other electronic equipment. Some wallets are now cloaked in a similar flexible mesh to prevent data and credit card theft. Mr Tyler said he wanted to force "people to interact in the real world" and remember how to socialise. "I just wanted people to enjoy a night out in my bar, without being interrupted by their phones," he said. "So rather than asking them not to use their phones, I stopped the phones working. I want you to enjoy the experience of going out."

Comments

Phones In The Basket

[Jason Levine]

I went to Buffalo, NY to visit family recently and a restaurant we went to tried encouraging people to put away their phones and talk. Instead of installing a Faraday cage, though, they put a basket (of the type they serve bread in) on the table. Everyone's phones went in and stayed there. If we kept our phones there during the entire meal, we got 10% off our check. (We kept our phones there and had fun taking "mental photos" of the kids instead of cell phone photos.)

I much prefer this system. It gives you an incentive to keep from looking at your phone without actively blocking your phone from being used. In case of an emergency, your phone is right there for you to use, but most times it'll just stay in the basket until after dinner is over.

Check out the Netflix documentary "The Irish Pub"

[jbarr]

It's an documentary detailing several very old Irish pubs, and while they don't mention a Faraday Cage, they bring up how the classic "Pub" concept is starting to fade because so many people are wrapped up in the Internet and electronics that they simply don't know how to just sit and converse.

Re:Good thing you have a choice

[Darinbob]

Pretty much everything in 1965 was illegal.

Re:Good thing you have a choice

[bev_tech_rob]

Back in the day you could expect at least 2 or 3 phone stalls in a public establishment such as a bar... often more, depending on its size and popularity.

If anyone RTFA, the bar actually DOES have landline phones at each table to call in another round of drinks or talk to folks at other tables. Doesn't mention if you can place calls to outside the bar...

Re:Just hope there is no incident that happens

[serviscope_minor]

You jest, but the people that did die in 80s because help couldn't get there soon enough aren't around to tell you their story.

Of course they did, but the world is large and all sorts of things happen. The question, of course, is how much. At no point in the 80s did I know someone who died who in hindsight would have not died had cellphone coverage existed. Any vaguely built up area in the 80s had landlines, so for areas where emergency services could respond quickly, phones were not in especially short supply in an emergency.

There are plenty of places now without cellphone coverage and yet, surprisingly many in cities (anywhere underground), and yet it still isn't a problem that people are dying in droves. The other aspect is the nature of deaths. Survivorship bias is a thing, but we can work things out.

Deaths are rare, about 9 per 1000 people per year. Given a reasonably occupancy numbers (100 people?) and occupancy time (it's a bar, say 5 hours per day for those 100), and say it has those numbers for the full 365 days per year. That gives an average 20 person years per year occupancy. Amortized over the whole population, that's an expected 1 death every 5 years with some pretty generous numbers.

Except of course, the majority of deaths are not unexpected. Most deaths occur among the elderly and sick and are somewhat expected, and spike for the very young too. The bar setting pretty much excludes those demographics. You can also subtract off the majority of the accidental deaths too since for example traffic collisions are rare indoors (and besides, that would put a huge hole in the shielding, letting in phone signals anyway, bystanders notwithstanding).

The expected number of deaths is somewhere in the region of one in several decades at most. So you're down to (say) 1 death in 20-30 years for which a cellphone might be useful.

The other side is of course that cellphone coverage is not ubiquitous by any means and we're talking about a bar which will certainly have a physical land line wired in too.

For the cellphone to be the key factor, there has to be no other means of dialling 999 (unlikely given the bar will have a phone), the person has to be saveable, and the emergency services would have had to arrive in time even with the cell phone call.

Those are hard to estimate of course, but the probabilities are all less than unity.

In other words, the chance of someone croaking in the bar who would have been saved by a cellhphone is negligible.

TL;DR unexpected deaths are rare. The number of lives saves by cellphones must be less than the accident rate, so the effect is quite small.