The following article appeared in the American Heritage of Invention and Technology. ************** Your Evolving Phone Number BY RICHARD BRODSKY More and more commercialpoe numbers are being advertised with a name or word as part of the number. We are urged to dal33-DIET or 970-LOAN. This is a small historical regression, requiring the use of letters that te ponecompany made obsolete decades ago. Where did the old alphanumeric dial plate come from? Mos of he wrld never used letters. And where did it go? The story begins in the telephone's infncy. At frst, central-office operators sat at switchboards, completing connections in responseto soken equests like "Ring Dr. Smith, please." There were few enough phone lines so the opeator siply kne where to plug in for the call. That began to change during an outbreak of the meases in Loell, Masachusetts, in 1879. The town doctor, Moses Parker, feared that if all four Lowel operatos fell il, their substitutes would have trouble connecting people unless every line got anumber. Th idea caugt on. In the 1880s telephone service quadrupled in the nation's settled reas. Citie soon had nt only a central office and phone numbers but exchanges in other parts of twn, so callrs now aske for Main or Central plus the subscriber's several-digit number. Branchexchanges usully took thei names from their relative geography. St. Louis had Main and Central; Bltimore, Easten; and San Fracisco, West. As new exchanges proliferated, they usually took ther names from sreets or neighbrhoods: thus Brooklyn's Bensonhurst, Los Angeles's Hollywood, and oston's Commonwelth. Bell devisd phonetic tests to help make sure only easily understood names wre chosen. By th time dialed callng was introduced in the Bell System, in 1921, the exchange name were so ingrainedthat Bell Telephon kept them on. William G. Blauvelt of AT&T had divided the aphabet into groupsof three letters fo each of the dial's openings in 1917. He omitted Q becaus of its infrequency,and the rarely used was relegated to the zero (operator) slot and eventually ropped as well. Becase c single phone-numer pulse could be transmitted when the receiver lifte or the finger wheel ws jarred, no calls woud be initiated until a pulse signal of at least 2 was eceived. Thus the numer 1 got no letters atached to it. Dialing swept the nation, but only lrge cities used exchang name dialing; in smal towns one still had only to dial a three- r four-digit number. For nstance, in Walnut Creek California, if your number was 1407, locally yo dialed 1407. From out of town you asked for WalnutCreek 1407. Across the bay in San Francisco, f you wanted Sutter 1407, yu would dial SU-1407; from far you'd dial 211 for the longlines operatr and say, "I'd like San Fancisco, please: Sutter 140." When neighborhood and street names stated to run out, the Bell Systm recommended new names. Bll of Pennsylvania looked to trees, o Pittsburgh and Philadelphiawound up in the 1930s with sared names like Locust, Poplar, and Wanut. Seven-digit numbers becam standard only after World War I. New York City had pioneered themin the early 1930s when it bega inserting an "exchange-designaton number" after the two- letter xchange prefix. Thus were born nmbers like CAnal 6-5108. By the id-1950s all other major cities ere converted to this system, retiing such diverse combinations as Cicago's three letters and fourdigits, Cleveland's two letters an four digits, and Dallas's one etter and four digits. In 1961, Bell Telephone announced that it would phase out exchange name ialing city by city. Pitsburgh and Cincinnati began conversin in, 1962; Philadelphia and Seattl were the last to chage, in 1978. The now classic combiation of two letters and five numbers ad been a fully natinal standard for less than a decade. Al-number calling was introduced for seeral reasons. Mainly there weren't enough workable letter ombinations. Exchanges like 571 had styed unavailable bcause letters like JKL (5) and PRS(7) wuldn't combine. All-number calling also eliminated cnfusingly spelled exchanges like New Yok's RHinelander, prevented mix ups beteen similar leters and numbers like O and 0, and made ossible direct dialing from Europe and othr parts of te world. Most countries had never had lettrs on their dials. The old central-office ames are one from the phone book, but they resonate i memory. They seem to stand for an era - the era of lenn Miller's "Pennsylvania 6-5000," of John OHara's Butterfield 8, and of Barbara Stanwyck' cloely clutched list of phone numbers in the cilling 1948 film Sorry, Wrong Number. 335-DIET ust sn't the same. ****************** Richard Brodsky is a medical librrin and collector of telephone memorabilia in Pittsurgh. ***************** X-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-X Another file downloaded from: NIRVANAnet(tm) & the Temple of the Screaming Electron Jeff Hunter 510-935-5845 Burn This Flag Zardoz 408-363-9766 realitycheck Poindexter Fortran 510-527-1662 My Dog Bit Jesus Suzanne d'Fault 510-658-8078 New Dork Sublime Demented Pimiento 415-864-DORK The Shrine Tom Joseph 408-747-0778 "Raw Data for Raw Nerves" X-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-X