AAT@vtmsl.bitnet (Asif Taiyabi) (02/17/91)
The following article appeared in the American Heritage of Invention
and Technology.
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Your Evolving Phone Number
BY RICHARD BRODSKY
More and more commercial phone numbers are being advertised with a
name or word as part of the number. We are urged to dial 335-DIET or
970-LOAN. This is a small historical regression, requiring the use of
letters that the phone company made obsolete decades ago.
Where did the old alphanumeric dial plate come from? Most of the world
never used letters. And where did it go? The story begins in the
telephone's infancy.
At first, central-office operators sat at switchboards, completing
connections in response to spoken requests like "Ring Dr. Smith,
please." There were few enough phone lines so the operator simply knew
where to plug in for the call. That began to change during an outbreak
of the measles in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1879. The town doctor,
Moses Parker, feared that if all four Lowell operators fell ill, their
substitutes would have trouble connecting people unless every line got
a number. The idea caught on.
In the 1880s telephone service quadrupled in the nation's settled
areas. Cities soon had not only a central office and phone numbers but
exchanges in other parts of town, so callers now asked for Main or
Central plus the subscriber's several-digit number. Branch exchanges
usually took their names from their relative geography. St. Louis had
Main and Central; Baltimore, Eastern; and San Francisco, West.
As new exchanges proliferated, they usually took their names from
streets or neighborhoods: thus Brooklyn's Bensonhurst, Los Angeles's
Hollywood, and Boston's Commonwealth. Bell devised phonetic tests to
help make sure only easily understood names were chosen.
By the time dialed calling was introduced in the Bell System, in 1921,
the exchange names were so ingrained that Bell Telephone kept them on.
William G. Blauvelt of AT&T had divided the alphabet into groups of
three letters for each of the dial's openings in 1917. He omitted Q
because of its infrequency, and the rarely used Z was relegated to the
zero (operator) slot and eventually dropped as well. Because c single
phone-number pulse could be transmitted when the receiver lifted or
the finger wheel was jarred, no calls would be initiated until a pulse
signal of at least 2 was received. Thus the number 1 got no letters
attached to it.
Dialing swept the nation, but only large cities used exchange name
dialing; in small towns one still had only to dial a three- or
four-digit number. For instance, in Walnut Creek, California, if your
number was 1407, locally you dialed 1407. From out of town you asked
for Walnut Creek 1407. Across the bay in San Francisco, if you wanted
Sutter 1407, you would dial SU-1407; from afar you'd dial 211 for the
longlines operator and say, "I'd like San Francisco, please: Sutter
1407."
When neighborhood and street names started to run out, the Bell System
recommended new names. Bell of Pennsylvania looked to trees, so
Pittsburgh and Philadelphia wound up in the 1930s with shared names
like Locust, Poplar, and Walnut.
Seven-digit numbers became standard only after World War II. New York
City had pioneered them in the early 1930s when it began inserting an
"exchange-designation number" after the two- letter exchange prefix.
Thus were born numbers like CAnal 6-5108.
By the mid-1950s all other major cities were converted to this system,
retiring such diverse combinations as Chicago's three letters and four
digits, Cleveland's two letters and four digits, and Dallas's one
letter and four digits. In 1961, Bell Telephone announced that it
would phase out exchange name dialing city by city. Pittsburgh and
Cincinnati began conversion in, 1962; Philadelphia and Seattle were
the last to change, in 1978. The now classic combination of two
letters and five numbers had been a fully national standard for less
than a decade.
All-number calling was introduced for several reasons. Mainly, there
weren't enough workable letter combinations. Exchanges like 571 had
stayed unavailable because letters like JKL (5) and PRS(7) wouldn't
combine. All-number calling also eliminated confusingly spelled
exchanges like New York's RHinelander, prevented mix ups between
similar letters and numbers like O and 0, and made possible direct
dialing from Europe and other parts of the world. Most countries had
never had letters on their dials.
The old central-office names are gone from the phone book, but they
resonate in memory. They seem to stand for an era - the era of Glenn
Miller's "Pennsylvania 6-5000," of John O'Hara's Butterfield 8, and of
Barbara Stanwyck's closely clutched list of phone numbers in the
chilling 1948 film Sorry, Wrong Number. 335-DIET just isn't the same.
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Richard Brodsky is a medical librarian and collector of telephone
memorabilia in Pittsburgh.
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Asif Taiyabi
Management Systems Lab. (703) 231-3501
1900 Kraft Drive aat@vtmsl.bitnet
Blacksburg, VA 24060 aat%vtmsl@vtvm1.cc.vt.edu
[Moderator's Note: Thanks for sending this along. The oldest exchange
in Chicago (312-236) comes from 1879 when there was but one exchange
and it was known as the 'central'. When a second office opened, it was
across the downtown area on Franklin Street (312-372), so it became
known as Franklin and the original retained the name Central. These
evolved into FRAnklin and CENtral when manual service was phased out
and dialing started (1939). When 3-L / 5-D changed to 2-L / 6-D these became
CEntral-6 and FRanklin-2, then a quarter century ago the final (or
most recent) change took place. The opening of the phone office at
Wabash Avenue and Congress Parkway downtown about 1890 brought us
WABash which is now 312-922. Many people *were* conrfused by the
names; they often dialed HP for Hyde Park instead of HY, etc. PAT]martin@cellar.bellcore.com (Martin Harriss (ACP)) (02/20/91)
In article <telecom11.121.4@eecs.nwu.edu> AAT@vtmsl.bitnet (Asif Taiyabi) writes: >When neighborhood and street names started to run out, the Bell System >recommended new names. Bell of Pennsylvania looked to trees, so >Pittsburgh and Philadelphia wound up in the 1930s with shared names >like Locust, Poplar, and Walnut. Interesting. Central Philadelphia has a Walnut Street, a Locust Street and a Poplar Street. These are important thorofares, I'm sure they existed in the 1930's. So which came first? the street or the telephone exchange? Martin Harriss martin@cellar.bae.bellcore.com [Moderator's Note: The locations came first, obviously, and the exchange names later. The exchanges tended to be named after the geographic area, the street they were on or a prominent nearby spot, such as our GRAceland, located in the proximity of the cemetery by the same name. Sometimes current events / politics was a factor: 312-842 (VICtory) was the first new dial exchange created in 1946 when manual ==> dial conversion was resumed following a four year hiatus during World War II due to Western Electric's manufacturing facilities being used full time by the government during the war. The CO had not existed at all before the war: Overcrowded conditions in the CALumet (312-225) CO which had to be tolerated during the war were alleviated by breaking off a couple thousand subscribers and placing them on the new CO when it opened ... just like an area code split today! :) PAT]
david@cs.uow.edu.au (David E A Wilson) (02/24/91)
ct@dde.dk (Claus Tondering) writes: > American companies, please listen to this piece of advice from a European: > If you want business from overseas, do not include letters in your phone > numbers. We can't use them over here. A bigger problem is the growing use of 800 numbers (without listing the POTS number). Overseas subscribers cannot call regular 800 numbers. We can call special six digit international 800 numbers. Is it just coincidence that most countries auto-reverse charge numbers start with either 800/008 or is there an international standard? David Wilson Dept Comp Sci, Uni of Wollongong david@cs.uow.edu.au [Moderator's Note: Well so far as I know, the Americans were using this technique first, of auto-reverse charging through the use of 800. I think as other PTT's picked up on the idea they just went along with the number (800) we were already using. PAT]