Question is whether the numbers in phone numbers represent quantities of anything, or whether they’re just being used purely as symbols (similar to sodoku). If the latter, were they initially used because at some point in phone technology they did represent numeric quantities or were they always just handy symbols?
ISTR at some point there were phones where after each entry you heard a number of clicks corresponding to the number dialed, but – even if I’m remembering correctly to begin with – that may have been artificially added and not inherent to the system.
(I was contemplating the notion of a system of phone numbers where letters of the alphabet were used instead of numbers. It would be easier to remember the – shorter – phone “numbers”, but would make for a less functional keyboard.)
That was dialing. The clicks were voltage pulses – actually voltage interruption pulses – and the central office decoded the clicks by advancing a 10-position switch once per pulse. So the number you dialed equaled a number of pulses equaled a switch position to physically select a path through the central office switch frame to connect your phone to the destination phone.
Because it was a mechanical system, 10 values per dialing position were a reasonable value for a mechanical switch system to be designed. Besides, how small are your fingers? 10 positions on a dial worked from a human-factors perspective as well.
The clicks were not artificial - they were a direct representation of the interruption of the signal as the dial returned to its rest state, and the number of interruptions/clicks corresponded to the number being dialed. Early push button phones recreated the clicks as the way the push buttoning interfaced with a system expecting clicks.
It was probably just an issue of functionality. It would have been more difficult to design a dialing system with twenty-six separate positions than one with ten separate positions. (IIRC there were times when phone misread a digit even with just ten of them.)
And I question whether the mnemonics would have been that much better. You still would have had to remember a random string of characters. It would have been a shorter string with twenty-six characters rather than ten but you would have had more characters to confuse together.
Diving into the issue of psychology, it may be easier to remember a string of numbers rather than a string of letters because we don’t associate strings of numbers with words and that minimizes the possible confusion. If we were memorizing strings of random letters, our brains might end up getting them mixed up with our memorized vocabulary.
Up until the 60s and we went to all digit dialing. Phone numbers were things like Klondike 4-3246. Klondike meant 55 because both K an L were associated with the 5 dial position (or later button). KL4 was called the exchange and was usually associated with a particular telephone “office”. Pretty much everyone in your neighborhood had a number that started KL4. Next neighborhood over might be YEllowstone 2. You knew approximately where your friend lived by knowing the exchange
This is (apparently) a “US thing.”
I once worked for a company that listed their phone number as 1-800-444-CRAP. One of our contractors in England had to get is kid’s Fisher-Price toy telephone out to figure out what “CRAP” meant in numbers.
Before touch-tone (tone dialing) pulse was simpler- it could be done with relays and 1910’s technology instead of fancy electronics. Determining number pressed by tone required some moderately fancy electronics - in the phone and the switch office. That tech would cost serious bucks. IIRC some of the smaller more stodgy regional phone companies had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the 20th century in the early 90’s. By then switch technology was a LOT cheaper.
Then over the 90’s and 00’s, most phone companies stopped allowing pulse dialing. Also, most do not support the power required 48V mechanical bells any more.
I used to “dial” that way, just for fun! I had trouble with 8, 9 and 0 (actually 10). My ‘9’ might be interpreted as ‘63’, say, or ‘81’ since even a slight pause meant ‘end-of-digit.’ Nine rapid clicks without pause were needed, but that was hard for clumsy me.
No data to back this up but I was told by someone who worked for the phone company back in the 60’s-70’s. The reason the numbers are laid out top to bottom on a phone is so they are opposite of a 10 key adding machine. The reason was when they first started designing the push button phones (that still used the pulse/clicks), they found that secretaries who were used to operating adding machines would key the number in too fast and overload the pulses. They reversed the number layout so they would have to slow down when dialing.
I used to do it for fun when I was about ten years old.
A few years later I had a friend who worked at the ticket booth of an old rundown movie theater. There was a phone in the booth for answering show-time questions and such, but ticket sellers got real bored on slow days(there were a lot of them) and tended to want make phone calls to friends. The theater didn’t want customers to get a busy signal while an employee was catching up on gossip, so there was a lock on the dial.
The old tap-on-the-hook trick easily bypassed the intent of the lock. My buddy also figured out that it was easier to do a quick ten taps to get the operator than to successfully tap out a full seven digit number. Operators were happy to place a call for you. My friend didn’t work there long. He was fired for receiving too many personal calls. They never figured out that he was making them.
Nowadays they are generally just symbols. However, originally, although the numbers didn’t have any intrinsic technical meaning, they were found to be very useful for organizing manual switchboard plugs.
The earliest manual switchboard telephones systems were used to connect together the wires leading to the two callers. In a small setting, say a business’ internal telephone system, it would be possible to label the plugs by name, so if someone called for “Mr. Big” there would be a plug with his name. But this would quickly become cumbersome in a municipal system, and the natural solution was to come up with some sort of numbering scheme. An analogy is that a small bed-and-breakfast can organize its rooms by descriptive names, but a hotel needs a numbering scheme.
Another example is bank accounts, which long ago were organized by owners’ names, instead of account numbers.
The numbers already existed at the time automated dialing was invented.
The original automated dialing tech, using those large 10-position relays was developed precisely to work with the existing system of telephone numbers consisting of digits between zero and nine.
We can’t discuss this without at least a nod to a Kansas undertaker called Almon Brown Strowger. It was he who invented the Strowger switch, which made automatic dialling possible.
