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Free dentures, cleaner air, and the birth of the payphone
A woman refuses to train her 25-year-old replacement, and two Kenyan teens are scrubbing city smog with corn cobs and algae.
Greg Sullivan
August 13, 2026 • Est. Reading Time: 4 minutes
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“Some guy on the radio called us the “lost generation” the other day. I wanted to find a payphone and a few quarters and tell that fool that we aren’t lost at all.”
― Alexandra Bracken
This issue of The Daily GOOD belongs to the young people getting things done (plus one veteran who's had enough). A 22-year-old who had never touched a 3D printer is now handing out free dentures. A woman asked to train her much younger replacement had other plans. And two Kenyan teens are scrubbing city smog with corn cobs and algae.
Care
No dentistry background, no 3D printing experience, no problem.
Dentures are one of those expenses that quietly wreck a household budget. A set runs anywhere from $450 to more than $6,500 depending on what a patient needs and what insurance will cover, and even for people who can swing it, the wait stretches from weeks into months.
Connor Gibson, an engineering student at a Tennessee community college who volunteered at Remote Area Medical's free mobile clinics, ran the numbers. An on-site 3D printer could collapse months into hours. There was one small complication, as Erik Barnes reports: Gibson had never touched a 3D printer, and he had never made a denture. So he taught himself both and had dental experts show him the old-fashioned method so he could reproduce every last detail digitally. "I made it my mission and studied up like I was doing a test," he told CNN.
Then came the first finished pair. "That first delivery was really a huge eureka moment," Gibson said, and what happened on that patient's face is the part he still struggles to put into words.
This otherworldly image is of the Apostle Islands, in Wisconsin. GOOD reader Georgia Ehrreich declares it her favorite place, summer or winter, and I can clearly see why.
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Which payphone-era survival skill do you miss most?Kids will simply never know. |
And what did we learn?
Would GOOD readers be interested in such a lengthy life? About 40% of you said yes, but only if their friends and family could come along for the ride.
Absolutely, I have a bucket list, and it is long (12.5%)
Only if everyone I love gets the same deal (40.8%)
Yes, but I want to pick which decade I stay in (10.8%)
122 sounds like plenty, thanks (35.8%)
GOOD reader Marguerite voted with the second place group, saying that 122 sounds like plenty of time. “Ain’t the years in my life, it’s the life in my years.“
Pop Culture | Courtesy of Upworthy
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People rally behind an older woman who refused to train her 25-year-old replacement | ||
“Want me to smile while you humiliate me? Wrong person.” | ||
By Heather Wake | ||
When an older employee was asked to train a 25-year-old to do the same job she’d been doing for as long as the young recruit had been alive, she had some choice words. And it became a vital lesson in not getting exploited. | ||
The TikTok creator, who goes by The Unobsolete (@theunobsolete) centers her content around helping people “fight age bias” in the workplace. She explained how she had been “passed over” for a promotion that she had rightfully earned over the past two-and-a-half decades and was instead expected to train someone “fresh out of grad school” who presumably would then do the job for a fraction of the price. | ||
“They expected me to teach her the job they said I wasn’t good enough for.” | ||
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Environment
Farm scraps in, city smog out, for a third of the going price.
When Fredrick Njoroge Kariuki turned 12, he couldn't stop coughing. The diagnosis was bronchitis, and the cause was sitting right outside his door: the haze pouring off the matatus and boda bodas that move most of Kenya through its cities. Nairobi's air carries 3.7 times the particulate pollution the World Health Organization considers safe, and experts link it to hundreds of premature deaths in the capital every year.
"I did not choose this problem. It chose me," Kariuki said. So at 17, he and classmate Miron Onsarigo built a device they call HewaSafi, Swahili for clean air, and the parts list reads like the back of a farm truck: steel mesh, copper, corn cobs, coconut shells, recycled batteries, and algae. As Erik Barnes reports, it bolts onto an ordinary exhaust pipe and starts stripping the fumes as they exit.
It is another entry in the growing genre of solving enormous problems with humble materials, alongside the donkeys keeping a Spanish national park from burning, the lab turning plastic trash into clean hydrogen, and the utility selling human waste back as fertilizer. Kariuki and Onsarigo want to put theirs on every minibus in the country.
On August 13, 1889, a Hartford inventor named William Gray received U.S. Patent 408,709 for a “coin-controlled apparatus for telephones,” which is a stiff way of saying he had invented the payphone. He got the idea the hard way. The year before, his wife fell seriously ill, and Gray went looking for a telephone to call a doctor, only to be refused access. He had to plead for the use of a stranger’s phone while his wife was sick. She recovered. The refusal stayed with him.
Gray was not exactly a telephone man. His previous hit was an improved chest protector for baseball catchers, which he sold to Spalding and which became popular equipment in the 1890s. That success gave him room to work out how a telephone could take payment without someone standing there to collect it. His first solution was wonderfully mechanical. Drop in the coins, and the machine unlocked access to the phone. A later version added bells that let the operator hear that the proper coins had been deposited.
The first coin-operated public telephone was installed in a Hartford bank, and eventually millions of payphones would be bolted to walls and street corners across America. Today they are nearly extinct, replaced by the little device most of us now carry everywhere.
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Until tomorrow, smile big and breathe deep; these kids might just be alright.