Antique phone numbers.

Factual Questions
1

While strolling 'round the antique mall today, I noticed a nifty tin match holder–an advertising piece for a dealer in “building material, crates, boxes, coops and planing millwork”. It featured what appeared to be two phone numbers, as follows:

BELL PHONE 68. L. 2.
CITZ. PHONE 214

(The periods, or lack thereof, are as they were on the piece.)

So what have we got going on here? Two competing phone systems? Also, the format of the numbers are like nothing I’ve ever seen–certainly not the familiar exchange+4. Any idea when this might’ve been? If it helps, the business was located in Glenford, Ohio. Anything you could share would be appreciated!

2

No cite, but I believe many competing phone systems existed in the early days, before the Bell monopoly. Businesses would have subscribed to multiple systems. Party lines used a combination of short and long rings, so your “68 L. 2.” could mean line 68 2 long rings.

Also, many numbering systems existed prior to the introduction of direct dial in the 1920s. In some small towns (like the one I grew up in) the 2 letter exchange was skipped. We just dialed 5 numbers well into the 1960s. My mom has a 1930s directory with 3 and 4 digit listings.

3

Yes, and for what it’s worth, the town must have been pretty small at the time; these days, it’s a whopping less than two hundred people in the middle of nowhere Ohio, between Columbus and Zanesville.

4

My grandmothers number up until about 1954 was 6089J. This was Danville VA. Not a tiny town.

5

As recently as 1955, my aunt, living on a farm, was on a party line with maybe 20 or 30 other households. She had a big old wooden box on the wall, with a mouthpiece and a wired earpiece, with a crank on the side. Her number was two-long, one-short, one-long. When you crank the ringer, everybody hears the ring on all the phones, and she would answer if she heard the 2L 1S 1L code, which meant it was for her. Of course, everybody picked up their phone and listened in on all conversations anyway.

My parents got their first phone in town, when I was 4 – that was 1943. Our number was 7-W, manually connected by a “number please” operator. We were on a party line with 7-J, who got a double ring – we got a single ring. There were also M and R suffixes. The 7,000 residents of the town didn’t get dial phones until well after 1960. The first phone dial I ever put my finger into was in my college dorm.

6

Until about 1956 or so, calling my home town in TX, you got the local operator. Told her who you wanted & she would plug in the cord and ring them and in my grandparents case, it was 1 long, 2 short.

7

Telephone history

Very good site.

8

Very interesting, thanks. So it sounds like there were two phone systems operating at the time, Bell and a competitor (perhaps “Citizens’”, or something similar). They were on a Bell party line of some sort, and the other system they had their own line, maybe…

9

This is mostly from my own memory, supplemented by what my father told me. Until, roughly, the end of the war, Philadelphia, no small town, actually had two competing telephone systems. The first was Bell and the second was called Keystone. The latter was pretty much used only by businesses (for B2B communication) because Bell didn’t allow businesses to have unlimited service and it was worth it to subscribe to two different phone services if you could make all the calls you wanted on one of them. At the end of the war, Bell bought Keystone and (my memory could be faulty here) promised to continue to operate it, but soon closed it. If you had a private phone, there were three price points: party lines (but I think only 2 parties), limited private lines (you paid for each call), unlimited private line. I still remember my grandmother getting a call for one of her neighbors who didn’t have a phone.

Now, for numbers. An exchange was literally that. It dealt with 10,000 number because they used a 100 x 100 plug board. If each socket was 1/2" x 1/2", that would make the board a bit over 4’ x 4’, but the spacing was likely a bit closer. If your number was GRAnite 3277 (as ours was) you were in the Granite exchange and your socket was in the 32nd row of the 77th column or vice versa. If you called another number in the Granite, say GRAnite 5555, the operation would actually run a wire from your socket to his. If you called SHErwood 1234 (my grandmother was in the Sherwood exchange, although I don’t recall her number), the operator would have connected to Sherwood and run a plug from my socket to Sherwood’s while the Sherwood operation would run a plug from their connection to 1234.

To be precise, this is what would have happened if we hadn’t had dial phones, although I have no memory of this. In my earliest memories, we had dial phones and relays at the exchanges automatically carried out the functions of the old operators. By my time, the operators were mostly used for long distance.

Now to dial us from anywhere in the city, you would dial GRA3277. But they were running out of numbers and, rather than dreaming up new exchange names, they split the existing exchanges. I recall GR2, GR4, and GR6. We of course became GR23277 (so our number didn’t change). A couple decades later they were again running out of exchanges so they went to 7 digits which allowed unpronounceable exchanges.

Now, I have to dial ten digits to make local calls. Of course, I now push buttons (although I still have one dial phone in service and you can still dial). They still charge extra for push buttons although it is clear that they are saving a lot of money on it. There was a moderately high rise building downtown that used to filled with relays that has been emptied, gutted and now being turned into condos. And the power to run all those relays must have been enormous.

10

Ditto for the small town I grew up in. Trumansburg Home Telephone System had 4 and 5 digit dialing well into the 1990s. For all I know it still does.

11

There are small independent phone companies even today: The Pattersonville Telephone Company, for instance. They provide phone service (plus other telecommunications) to a few thousand customers. They have always had their own exchange and numbers, though it’s been integrated into the national system.

When I was growing up, it took four numbers to dial anyone in my town; neighboring towns required dialing seven. This ended around 1970.

In addition, Greenport, NY had an operator-run phone exchange into the early 60s. If you lived there, you picked up the phone (they had no dials) and the operator would pick up to get your number. Most were three digits (e.g., 477). If you called into Greenport, you’d call the operator and have her connect you. There were even some double- and single-digit numbers, though I don’t know if you could call them by simply saying 1 (the pharmacy back then). When direct dial was added, the phone numbers added leading zeroes to make them four digits (thus 477 would be 0477)

12

Not necessary competition but phone companies started small and grew until they were large enough to connect to the next phone company. Until AT&T was formed and began combining the companies into one large company it was possible to have neighboring companies.

On the ranch we were on the last line of a rural phone company. If a line (wire) on the poles broke my dad or another neighbor had to fix and maintain it. We were connected to the AT&T exchange in town. If we wanted to call someone we had to pick up the phone listen to see if anyone was talking, If no one was ask “line bussy?” If it was not the ring one long ring for the operator. Or if calling any of the 20 families on the line ring their code. Our ring was 2 longs and 1 short.

My swag on the 68L2 would be 68th line 2nd phone. Our number on the ranch was 23f11. It stood for the 23rd line 11th phone.

13

Even during the peak of the Bell monopoly there were still other phone companies. My part of Los Angeles was controlled by General Telephone in the 70s and 80s. I’m too young to remember the exchanges but my Mom’s phone book was old the the first numbers that she wrote into it were the old way. We were EXmont. My pediatrician was OLympic.

14

Our summer house was on a party line until at least 1975, I can’t remember the number of rings offhand, but the correct long form number after that was 237-3110, but could be gotten in the town exchange by dialing 7-3110.

15

Possibly of interest… 'twas only a scant 24 years ago, and not far from where I live that the last (in the U.S. at any rate) hand-cranked battery/magneto party line disconnected from the grid. Not mentioned in the linked story, the two-dozen or so users have apparently kept the old line intact voluntarily and still use it to communicate among themselves, although of course it’s no longer connected to any outside system.

16

I know the letter on the end indicated a party line. Assuming the letter could be dialed as its number on the face of the phone, did this mean that if there were nine households or fewer on the same party line, then they didn’t need to listen for ring patterns?

In the early to middle twentieth century, after the formatting of its subscriber numbers had become somewhat standardized, Bell offered a list of recommended exchange names calculated to avoid phonetic ambiguity while being utterly commonplace words and names to competent speakers of English living in America. Exchange names like CRestview, GRanite, BRadshaw, MIchigan, and DUnkirk were used in various places all over the country.

On the other hand, many places had geographic names; e.g. Hollywood where many numbers had HOllywood prefixes (and in some cases the last four digits were and remain their address on Hollywood Boulevard). MUrray Hill and BEnsonhurst in NYC are further examples. Could it be that small to medium sized towns like Danville just had a local exchange technologically speaking, but ordinary subscribers never had to use it. All incoming and outgoing calls were long distance, so anyone wanting to call your grandmother from outside of Danville would always have to do it through an operator. And it would be the operator’s business to route the call through to Danville WV.

17

Right; the part a lot of folks forget is that exchanges were originally thought of as buildings (well, more specifically, switchboards), with specific locations, rather than mere groupings of telephone numbers. So long as there were fewer than 10,000 subscribers, the town was the exchange—up until the point when people began dialing their own long distance calls, meaning even a place like Danville needed to be part of the national network, accessed like other exchanges.

Originally exchange names could be geographically meaningful, so long as they could easily be distinguished when heard. Before 1923, all calls in Chicago were made by telling the operator something like “Calumet 412 please.” When subscriber dialing was introduced in the 1920s, the users dialed the first three letters of the exchange name using the letters on the phone dial, followed by the four numbers for the specific line to ring. So the three-digit numbers represented by the names now had to be distinctive. That still left some room for creativity, but new exchanges in growing areas often needed to use letters that didn’t suggest anything very local. Thus the generic “recommended” exchange names.

In the late 1940s, big cities began to shift to “2 + 5” dialing. To make the conversion easy, the third digit was kept the same wherever possible. So if your number had previously been HARrison 7186, now it was HA7-7186, since the R dials 7 anyway. In some places this wasn’t possible, and more importantly, new third digits could be introduced to expand capacity.

18

Hey, there’s a whole generation of kids today who have never put their fingers into dial phones!

ETA: Did “number please” operators really say “Number plee-az?”

19

My mom born 1942 STILL sometimes due to a Skype bandwidth issue asks if it is due to a party line, confuses the hell out of other people.

:slight_smile:

20

I don’t know if the party-line setup was compatible with direct dial technology, but I’ve always wondered if it was possible to dial the alpha suffix of a party-line phone simply by dialing the appropriate digit. I notice that in your example the suffixes are all mutually exclusive with respect to the digits concerned.