Officially, the GPO did away with the mnemonics in 1966 but it took a long time for folks to lose the habit.
I would say by 1980 it was gone altogether. I started work around then for a company in Archway, London (ARC, or 272) but I don’t ever remember giving out the number to customers as “Archway 3400”.
The phone numbers didn’t change BTW. My parents had TUD-1087 and then 883-1087 for 30 something years.
Those mechanical exchanges didn’t just have a ten-position rotary switch. They had a whole room full of banks and banks of them.
One rotary switch, once set into a position, held one digit of a phone number. A bank of seven of them, set one at a time as you dialed, held the entire number. As you dialed the first digit (more precisely, when you let go of the dial and it turned back to its home position), the first switch got set to its position, then some other relay connected your phone to the second rotary switch.
When you dialed the second digit, that got set into the second switch, and then some relay connected your phone to the third switch. And so on.
A phone exchange consisted of a room full of rows of banks of seven switches to accommodate multiple phone calls being in progress at once.
It’s possible you could see an exhibit of such a set-up in a museum somewhere. The Pioneer Museum in Paso Robles, CA had such a display once. (I kind of think it’s not there any more 
) One full wall of the exhibit was full of rotary switches. There was a desk in the middle of the room, with a rotary telephone on it. You could dial a number on the phone and see all the switches getting set.
As noted above, pulse dialing continued to be available for some time after tone “dialing” took over, eventually to be phased out.
And in case you had a touch-tone phone but your phone company only supported pulse dialing, phones had a “TT/DP” switch on them. Set to DP (dial pulse), your phone would emit clicks instead of tones.
And if a tone-driven exchange received a call in pulse mode, it would convert that, effectively, to the equivalent tones.
In those senses, pulse dialing became an artificial contrivance. The phone, instead of having a mechanical dial that sent electrical pulses, generated fake pulses. And the exchange, if it wanted tones but received pulses, artificially did the reverse conversion (as opposed to having mechanical rotary switches). So once that began happening, pulses did become artificial as OP thought. But it wasn’t always that way.
My phone has a TT/DP switch. I never tried dialing with pulses to see if my phone company still can handle it.
“Dialing” a number used to mean, very literally, dialing a number. Phones no longer have dials, and we no longer literally dial numbers, but dialing is still called dialing, and always will be.
When I was at university, our local Bell Canada network had the reverse situation: your phone could emit DTMF / Touch-Tone sounds, then you heard the exchange at the other end tediously converting those sounds into sequences of clicks. This didn’t happen in other towns, only there. I think this is what the OP was referring to.
At one point it became even more ridiculous: Bell Canada made Touch-Tone mandatory and billable, but they still hadn’t upgraded that particular exchange. So when you dialed with your mandatory Touch-Tone, which you were paying for, you still had to wait for the click-click-click-click-clicks before your call could be routed.
In the early days of touch-tone, at least in areas where I lived, touch-tone was optional and cost more.
I first lived fully independently in 1973. Applying for a phone account, the service rep asked me if I wanted pulse or tone, and noted that tone dialing cost more.
In those days, the Phone Company (it was AT&T, or Ma Bell, everywhere) really wanted to convert the world, the universe, and everything to touch-tone. They pushed is incessantly and vigorously. Yet it remained optional, and they charged more for it. :dubious:
So I asked the service rep why they did that. No answer was to be had.
I got the rotary phone account.
(Note, this was long before you could do any kind of electric business or data entry by touch-tone, which is of course a routine thing now.)
I seem to recall a touch-tone surcharge on phones here in Chicago up until the late 80s at least, but I feel it was more like the early 90s. And pulse dialing worked fine through at least the mid-90s, as my grandfather had only owned a rotary dial phone.
ETA: Heck, I see a Boston Globe article from 2003 that mentions touch-tone fees, so it looks like they went on for far longer than I thought. (Unless they made touch tone mandatory and just charged a fee anyway for it.)
When I was growing up, the town next to us didn’t have either touch tone or pulse dialing – they still used operators. Phones had no dial; you’d pick it up and say the number. Many of the phone only had three-digit numbers – you’d tell the operator “467, please” and they’d connect you. I’ve seen evidence that one business had a phone number of “2.”
When they did get an exchange, a leading zero was added to the number.
To get back to the OP, the early exchanges were manned by operators. The exchanges were named, often by locales. My grandmother’s exchange was SHErbrooke, which was the name of her area. Ours was GRAnite, which probably didn’t represent anything. At any rate you didn’t dial, you picked up the phone and the operator asked, “Number please”. If you were calling a number in the same exchange you gave him (in the really early days, the operators were mostly men as they tended to have a longer reach. If you asked for 3277, say, he would take the phono plug (google if you want to see what one looks like) and plug it into the socket that was in the 77th position of the 32nd row of the 100 by 100 plugboard he was facing. He would also press a button that would ring that number, until it was answered. That 100 by 100 plugboard was what required the long reach. If you needed another exchange, the operator would use a “trunk line” to call the other exchange and route the call through that. When long distance calling became possible, you operator would call one in the next town over, who would call one in a further town who would call one… Well you get the idea. If you called, say, NY to LA, it could take an hour to set it up and you would be called back when your call was finally through.
Then came dialing and it was all automated. But long distance calls still required lots of time and effort and the charges were proportional. Then direct distance dialing and it all was easy. But the last four digits go back to those 100 by 100 plugboards. As for the first three, Well, our GRA became GR2 and then GR4 and GR6 were added, those numbers having no particular significance AFAIK. Finally it changed to 472, just the numerical equivalent of GRA, but these no longer represented distinct exchanges. When direct distance dialing came in, the area codes were assigned arbitrarily, but the largest population centers got the easiest to dial ones. So NY was–and still is–212, and my hometown of Philly was 215. I suppose Chicago and LA must have been 213 and 214, but I don’t feel like checking. Later on everything changed as the need for more area codes arose. And ease of dialing stopped mattering with touch tone phones. I still have an old dial phone in my house and it still works fine. So the phone companies still support the dials although probably not using the old relays that were the first automated exchanges.
Close. Chicago is 312; LA is 213; Detroit is 313; St. Louis 314. 214 is I think Dallas/Ft Worth, lemme look it up … yeah. Now, of course you have many more area codes for those cities, and what was, say, 312 in Chicago and its environs has been split off into tons of area codes, but those were the original ones for the metro areas.
I don’t think this story is accurate. The tone signal timing is only 40 milliseconds; I doubt that even the fastest secretary could key numbers faster than 125 numbers in one second.
The company story was that the early touch-tone buttons had both the number and the 3 letters on them, and to arrange the buttons like an adding machine would have had the alphabet out of order, which they thought would confuse people.
The number DID have some significance in the 1940s, when the Area Code system was designed: the pulse dialing system timing varied by digit – it took 9 times longer to dial a 9 than a 1. So they assigned big population centers area codes that took the shortest time for the dial system to process (212=New York City, 213=Los Angeles, 312=Chicago, 313=Detroit).
Party lines. Two or more homes shared the same line; different ring-tones informed us who was being called. If you picked up the line to dial out and heard voices you hung up real quick. We had a party line circa 1960; when did they finally go away?
And that’s the reason you never have digit ‘1’ as the leading number in either area codes or exchange numbers (the 1st 3 digits) – with pulse dialing, the equipment couldn’t tell a random interruption on the line from a dialed ‘1’. And random clicks are frequent in a system with thousands of miles of wires on poles, and hundreds of technicians fixing wires every day, etc. So all the telephone numbers start with a non-1 digit (2-10 clicks) – this told the system that this was a phone number coming, so after that ‘1’ could be used as part of the number.
Originally, all area codes had ‘0’ or ‘1’ as the second digit. This meant that by the time the 2nd digit was dialed, the system could tell if it was a local call or long distance, and could begin setting up the switching route while the customer was still dialing the remaining 5 or 8 digits. The few seconds saved on each call really adds up on the thousands of phone calls dialed each hour.
We used to make calls on the old MIT dormline system that way all the time.
These pulses were a problem for me. I used to tape albums, and my recording of the long piano chord at the end of “Day in the Life” was marred by clicks from the phone on the other side of the wall my needle picked up.
And to make this even more ironic, touchtone was cheaper for the phone company than pulse dialing. A significant part of the cost of a call was setup, which used the switch. Since it took less time for the customer to dial a pulse call, it cost more. And remember back then many calls were no answers or busy for which the phone company paid in terms of switch time but couldn’t charge for.
Why did Bell do it? Because they could. I used to work there.
that and phone menus is what really pushed touch-tone over the top i mean could you imagine trying to navigate your cc company or bank on a pulse phone?
I never heard of phone menus or any kind of telephone data entry until long after touch-tone was well established. I suppose there were some early systems experimenting with it. I’m sure the designers of the whole touch-tone protocol had it in mind from the beginning that it could be used that way, and foresaw a future for touch-tone data entry. Note that the * and # keys were on touch-tone phones from the beginning even though they weren’t initially used for anything; they had some kind of plans for that.
Does anybody know any of the history of phone menu systems or phone data entry? From what I know, that didn’t become available, or at least not common, until years later.
This explains why, since 1935 in the UK, we have 999 as our emergency number. ‘0’ was already used to call the operator. which ruled out 000. 111 would have enabled faster dialling which would have been a good thing in some circumstances, but it would have been more prone to misrouting. 222 was already used by the Abbey local telephone exchange (ABB=222), so 999 was chosen as the best option.
I remember being taught how to dial it in the dark by using two fingers - one in the ‘0’ and the next in the ‘9’.
I’m not convinced. Your story doesn’t explain why 1 or 0 was never used as the second digit of an exchange. And the answer seems simple. Exchanges were originally two letters and a digit, and there were no letters associated with 1 or 0. Once direct long distance dialing was enabled, long distance was signaled by an initial 1. Remember calls within your area code could be long distance, and calls to a different area code might not be long distance.
The last one I personally knew of was in the 1980s. I did a bit of googling to see if any still existed. I figured there had to be at least a few oddballs out there.
According to AT&T, there are still thousands of “party lines” out there, but most only go to a single user these days (hence the quotes). All of the other users have dropped off of the service, but there is at least one customer still using the original party line.
I also found a reference to a camp with a bunch of cabins in California that still uses a party line.
There was a push to get rid of the remaining party lines in the 80s/90s as local communities started creating 911 systems that could trace calls.