Motorists will not celebrate and even the staff of Westminster council's formidable parking department have not planned any official ceremony to mark the day. It will be left to historians and the employees of a few “parking management solutions” companies to find a suitable act of revelry with which to solemnise the occasion.

For today is the 50th anniversary of the parking meter. Mayfair residents awoke half a century ago to find their pavements had been planted with 600 of them, dials poised to measure the minute with unforgiving accuracy.

Richard Nugent, Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Transport and Civil Aviation, arrived ceremonially to insert a shilling (5p) into a meter in Grosvenor Square.

He was too late: many of the meters had already swallowed their first coins and cars were parked in the bays. Even on the first day of parking meters one had to be quick. The first motorist to curse and search for the correct change in an open palm was thus lost to history.

Times Archive, 1958: Leading article: Bring on the meters

The chaos caused by parked vehicles in London is so wasteful of time, money and temper that some people are driven to propose Draconian legislation

• Parking meter plan passed

• Practical substitute for parking meters

• Letter to the editor: Parking meters

Parking meters, which had previously been tested in a private car park that occupied a bombsite near Portland Place, began life under the Road Traffic Act. The Government's first parking meter order - for the northwest corner of Mayfair - came into use on July 10, 1958.

The first person to fall foul of the meter rules was a secretary called Elizabeth O'Dwyer, aged 19, from Croydon. A colleague engaged in an unexpectedly lengthy telephone call had handed her a shilling and asked her to feed the meter.

Yesterday, Ms O'Dwyer, who still works one day a week as a secretary in Westminster, recalled the moment when, in an otherwise blameless career, she fell foul of the law. “I was stepping out to get some lunch,” she said. “I passed a policeman. I thought, ‘Oh goodie!' I thought it was his job to monitor them and I had got there first.”

What Ms O'Dwyer did not know was that lurking on the street was a new agent of enforcement, a parking attendant. “I didn't know it was illegal to feed the meter,” she said. Her pleas fell on deaf ears and the case came before Clyde Wilson, a magistrate at Marlborough Street Court.

Fortunately for Ms O'Dwyer the guardians of social order had not quite caught up with this revolution in roadside regulations. “The magistrate did not seem to understand the rules,” she said. The case was dismissed and the RAC offered to pay her court costs of two shillings. “It was my 15 minutes of fame,” she said.

The introduction of the meters had been called for by this newspaper in a series of editorials that declaimed the “chaos caused by parked vehicles in the centre of London”.

Patrick McDonnell, a chronicler of parking meters down the ages for the magazine Parking Review, described that chaos. “People were triple parking in Westminster,” he said.

In 1954 Winston Churchill's Government considered and rejected the idea of paving over Hyde Park and the Mall for parking spaces. The Times looked to the example of America, where Carlton Magee had patented the first parking meter in 1935 to ease the gridlock in Oklahoma City.

Motoring groups protested at proposals for parking meters, calling the British motorist “the most heavily taxed on Earth”. Nevertheless, the effect of the meter was pronounced. In 1968 a reporter timed a journey from Marble Arch to Regent Street. It took four minutes; in 1958 it had taken 35 minutes.

The place of parking meters in British history was assured, though now, much like the motorists they have regulated, their time is running out. From a peak of 750,000 in Britain, there are now fewer than 1,000. They have been replaced by pay and display machines, and, latterly, by cashless meters, operated via a mobile phone or credit card.

Westminster, the borough that pioneered their use, expects to be rid of the last one before the end of the year. Danny Chalkley, the councillor responsible for parking in the borough, said that anyone who would like a meter should contact the council.

Ms O'Dwyer is considering putting one in her front garden.

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