I remember party lines and having only 4 digits for a phone number. Ours was 7117 and my grand parents’ was 7049......But I can’t remember what I had for dinner last night.
When I was in college in western Michigan, local calls were five digits.
I also remember when Bell quit charging for extra extensions and teaching myself how to wire phone lines and running several extensions at our house. I was maybe 15.
Did you know that phone lines run constant 9 volts. The voltage increases to 48 volts to cause the ringer to activate?
Did you also know that it’s not a good idea to strip the wire insulation with your teeth as the phone rings?
I lived in a town years ago where phone numbers were handed out in order... the first person to get a phone was ‘1’... Our phone number was 612 since the owner before us gave us his phone number.
Ours was 4253. Our neighbors across the road was 4357. We called them the most. Fortunately they weren’t on the same party line as us so you could just dial the 4 numbers.
The houses on our same party line were on the same side of the road. If you wanted someone on our party line you dialed some other one or two digit number(?) then their 4 digit number and hung up. Your phones would both ring. When they picked up both would stop ringing and you had to quickly pick up before they hung up.
We were served by a small local telephone company that had three towns and their rural customers all together. So you could call local 25 miles away to the west. But more than a mile or two east or north was long distance.
Long distance was expensive and only used for very important or vital messages.
There was one public phone in the town (we lived in the country). You could call a local number and it would ring the number. You could hear the called party but they could not hear you until you deposited a dime. So of course we’d call when we were needing to be picked up and they knew ahead of time that we’d be calling so never actually put the dime into the slot.