Posted on 07/20/2011 6:44:18 PM PDT by jocon307
You probably dial a few of them every day, but do you ever stop and think about the history behind a phone number? When were the first numbers introduced? How did you end up with a particular area code?
We’ve got the answers to these quandaries and more in our collection of 10 fascinating facts that you might not know about the common phone number.
(Excerpt) Read more at mashable.com ...
It was that way in my hometown until the late 1980s.
GA(rfield) 6-1000 or ME(tcalf) 3-1000
“Later exchanges consisted of one to several hundred plug boards staffed by telephone operators. Each operator sat in front of a vertical panel containing banks of ¼-inch tip-ring-sleeve (3-conductor) jacks, each of which was the local termination of a subscriber’s telephone line. In front of the jack panel lay a horizontal panel containing two rows of patch cords, each pair connected to a cord circuit. When a calling party lifted the receiver, a signal lamp near the jack would light. The operator would plug one of the cords (the “answering cord”) into the subscriber’s jack and switch her headset into the circuit to ask, “Number, please?” Depending upon the answer, the operator might plug the other cord of the pair (the “ringing cord”) into the called party’s local jack and start the ringing cycle, or plug into a trunk circuit to start what might be a long distance call handled by subsequent operators in another bank of boards or in another building miles away. In 1918, the average time to complete the connection for a long-distance call was 15 minutes.[8] In the ringdown method, the originating operator called another intermediate operator who would call the called subscriber, or passed it on to another intermediate operator.[9] This chain of intermediate operators could complete the call only if intermediate trunk lines were available between all the centers at the same time. In 1943 when military calls had priority, a cross-country US call might take as long as 2 hours to request and schedule in cities that used manual switchboards for toll calls.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_exchange
>>> Whenever I hear it in a drama it somehow breaks the spell of the suspension of belief and you acutely realize that it’s all fakery before your eyes.
True but they really have no choice. Put in an actual number and thousands of idiots call it. Ask the people who had Jenny’s number. 867-5309
No, but I've sometimes found myself wondering what ingredient it is that makes that glop on stadium nachos the exact same color as those yellow plastic seats you see in places like bus stations.
Boyd Franks, a physicist and worker in the ITT lab, invented the redial. He lives in a small town in NE Mississippi.
"I love wrong numbers."
“things like “Klondike 558”
Yes, they should have explained that a bit better.
Back in the day, the “exchange” part of the phone number was a word.
I think it started with just the word, or actually the first 2 letters of the word, and then the actual number, which I think at the very beginning was probably more like an extension. I mean, remember “party lines”? Where a bunch of houses would share one actual line and if your neighbors were talking, you couldn’t be.
I actually visited with some friends in their upstate NY summer house which as late as the early 90s still had a party line.
Soon enough when they needed more numbers they added a third number to the exchange part.
I think KLondike was a real exchange, at least in NYC so it would make sense it would have gotten used for TV stuff since so much early TV was shot in NY.
Mine was ORegon. OR7-xxxx.
The most famous one of these is probably BUtterfield 8 from the melodramatic Liz Taylor movie of the 1960s.
I remember my brother telling me that my parents were very upset they had to give up some classy exchange at one point, when they moved, but I can’t remember what that was. ORegon was low rent, for some reason!
Others I can remember are:
JUdson
GRamercy (AH! that was probably the one they lost out on. I knew a lot of kids with that exchange, we were in the Gramercy Park neighborhood, dontcha know)
HUdson
It was kind of cool and then it was just gone.
Oh well, now we have cool internet nicknames like “jocon307” and “an american in turkiye”, so we’ll have to be happy with those....for now!
My daughter has a toy rotary phone. I recently asked a 20 yr old who saw the toy if she knew how to operate such a device. I had to explain how it worked. (Though the toy did not have an actual finger stop near the 3 o’clock position.)
Old joke alert!
Before there was Jenny’s 867-5309 there was Lonesome 7-7203. Tony Booth did a remake of this song around 1973 but the original was recorded around 1950.
As teens my stepfather took us to his telephone company switching room and let us listen to a minute or so of our neighbor’s phone calls by connecting a portable phone with alligator clips, he evidently knew which lines were which, after that we assumed that he monitored all of our own phone calls.
“the designers of the first digital phones were worried that 10 key operators would overwhelm the ability to process the input.”
That is very interesting. They probably would have.
I’m very good at the 10 key board, very fast, and I just very recently realized it is upside down from a phone pad.
I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed it!
But, then again, I still miss my grandmother’s really old, heavy, always cold phone, with it’s slow, clicking rotary dial.
Ours was MI9 -—Mission 9 or 649
Our old phone number was 147-M, and it was two rings on a party line. (old. This makes me feel REEEEALY old...)
“...after that we assumed that he monitored all of our own phone calls.”
That was probably a good assumption!
Most towns had one or more prefixes comprised of two numbers. The town I lived in started with 874 which corresponds to TRI and these letters were associated with the word TRInity. It was a short hand way of identifying the initial part of the phone number.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.