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History
History
In the late 1870s the Bell interests started exploiting their patent with a
rental scheme, in which they would rent their instruments to individual users
who would contract with other suppliers to connect them, for example from home
to office to factory. Western Union and the Bell company both soon realized that
a subscription service would be more profitable, with the invention of the
telephone switchboard or central office. Such an office was staffed by an
operator who connected the calls by personal names.
The latter part of 1879 and the early part of 1880 saw the first use of
telephone numbers at Lowell, Massachusetts. During an epidemic of measles, Dr.
Moses Greeley Parker feared that Lowell's four telephone operators might succumb
and bring about a paralysis of telephone service. He recommended the use of
numbers for calling Lowell's more than 200 subscribers so that substitute
operators might be more easily trained in the event of such an emergency. Parker
was convinced of the telephone's potential, began buying stock, and by 1883 he
was one of the largest individual stockholders in both the American Telephone
Company and the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company.
Even after the assignment of numbers, operators still connected most calls into
the early 20th century; "Hello Central, get me Underwood-342."
Connecting through operators or "Central" was usual until mechanical dialing of
numbers became more common in the 1920s.
In North America, the digits 2-9 of phone numbers were allotted 3 letters of the
alphabet apiece. In the UK, the letters O and Q were allocated to the digit 0,
to reduce caller confusion among similar characters; digit 6 had only M and N,
and digit 7 had P, R and S.
Phone numbers were not usually strictly numeric until the 1950s. From the 1920s
until then, most urban areas had "exchanges" of two letters, followed by
numbers. In the UK, however, exchanges in the major cities with Director
installations were represented by three letters followed by four numbers; the
letters usually represented the name of the exchange area (e.g. MAYfair,
WATerloo), or something memorable about the locality (e.g. POPesgrove - an area
where Alexander Pope once lived). This was considered easier to remember,
although in London in the later part of this period it required the memorization
of 7 characters (roughly the same number of characters as is usual for local
calling in 2006). A word would represent the first two digits to be dialed, for
example "TWinbrook" for "89" ; "BYwater" for "29"; 736-5000 was "PEnnsylvania -
6- 5 thousand". UK numbers had no letters at all except for those in the
Director areas, where the first three of the seven digits were assigned letters,
and written "ABBey 1234" or "WHItehall 1212", for example. A lack of
pronounceable words, and the fact that most telephones world-wide have no
letters on anyway, have led to the abandonment of letter usage in directory
numbers except for publicity purposes.
The use of numbers starting in 555- to represent fake numbers in U.S. movies,
television, and literature originated in this period.
Phone numbers were traditionally tied down to a single location, but the
introduction of mobile telephones has changed this. In many countries, the
practice of number portability allows customers to transfer a phone number from
one local exchange carrier to another, or even from a fixed-line phone to a
mobile phone.
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