(Not counting the area codes which are manditory to dial in some areas today - even for local calls.) Going back in the history of the telephone, were there ever less than 7-digit phone numbers? Granted, my parents recall when the first 3 digits were the first three letters of a Proper Noun representing some geographic area. Often, it was expressed as the whole word, like BRX-5555 would be Bronx 5555, for an example (which I made up, so don’t quote me.) Sometimes, you hear this on old TV shows.
But, going further back, how many digits were necessary? And,
was it a big deal when the number of digits you had to dial (and remember) increased? - Jinx
Numbering eras in the United States for the Bell System:
* First telephone numbers (1877) are just names
* Depending on exchange size, two, three or four digit numbers assigned to subscribers,
* Two letter prefix codes assigned to four digit numbers (Circa 1928 to 1958). AT&T's operating companies started installing dial telephones in the mid to late 1920s. The Bell System thought abbreviations would prevent misdialing, a mnemonic device to help callers unaccustomed to using dial telephones. Famous example in the Glenn Miller song "PEnnsylvania 6500".
* In larger cities three letter prefix codes assigned to four digit numbers (Post WWII)
* Seven digit, all number dialing begins phase in. (1958)
When I was a kid in Albuquerque (1950s) everybody had 5 digit phone numbers. I’m not sure how you called someone outside town (I wasn’t allowed to do it) but I think you had to go through the operator.
Sometime in the mid-1950s they added a two-letter alpha prefix to bring the numbers up to 7. The alpha code was the same for all numbers with the same first digit, in fact numbers starting with both 5 and 6 had the prefix ALpine and numbers starting with both 3 and 4 had the prefix CHapel. This was probably necessary before you could direct-dial anybody.
Sometime in the 1960s they converted the alpha prefixes to numbers and added a lot of new exchanges.
Now, of course, lots of merchants have gone to all-alpha dialling so that they can get their company name or slogan or product as their phone number.
For a long time (into the 1980s, I think) there were a few small communities where you would only dial 4 or 5 numbers to get another phone in the community. I don’t know if those are all gone now.
As recently as 1992 (maybe into early 1993), it was only necessary to dial 5 digits to make a local phone call in several rural west Texas communities. For instance, when I made a call within Alpine (TX), I only dialed 7-xxxx. People calling me from outside the local area, however, did have to dial the full number (plus area code): 915-837-xxxx.
I grew up in a small town rural Louisiana and it was only necessary to dial 4 digits if you were calling locally. This lasted until 1985 or so. Technically, there was a prefix of 697 but that was only used if someone was calling you from out of town.
Ditto. When I lived in Kentucky in the mid-70s it was only necessary to dial the last 4 or 5 numbers to reach someone in your own exchange. If you were dialing someone in another exchange, you had to dial all 7 numbers.
A couple of years later the phone company upgraded its system and added touch tone. At that time it became necessary to dial all 7 digits for all local calls.
I’m old enough that I first memorized my family’s number as CRestview 5-xxxx, but we always had to dial 7 numbers calling in or calling out. I also remember innumerable TV commercials telling you to dial “RIchmond 9 - xxxx”, or to call “ZEnith - xxxxx”, for which you obviously needed to go through the operator since there’s no Z on the dial.
My parents still live in the same house, and have the same number.
I remember a Pacific Bell auctioning off some three-digit phone numbers a few years ago. I never heard what became of it. They were expecting to get several million dollars for the truncated numbers.
When I was growing up, the town next to us still hadn’t installed dialing (the phone didn’t even have a dial). You picked up the phone and told the operator the number.
The interesting thing was that the exchange had the last four digits ending in 1 or 0. Thus it was perfectly possible to pick up the phone and say “477 please” and get 0477.
Dialing in, you got the operator and told them the number.
Likewise in Iowa. When I was a kid, and up until about 12 years ago, in my home town one only had to dial 5 numbers. There was only one exchange and all the 4 digit sections started with a 2, 5 or 7. To dial out of town, but in area code, you had to dial 1 then the seven digit number. Now even in my home town you have to dial all 7 digits.
As to whether it was a big deal or not, my grandmother thought it was. When she could no longer dial 4 or 5 digits for local numbers in her small town she bitched about it endlessly.
A uniform seven digit dial plan came in partially to support DDD (direct distance dialing). Some offices can still be configured to allow dialing of short numbers while still allowing direct dial of longer ones. Usually, you can’t do it - you require too many numbers to be able to avoid short numbers which would conflict with the leading digits of seven digit numbers (this is why places that CAN do it are typically rural with a small number of subscribers).
Many places experienced the switchover at the same as getting DDD, no longer requiring operator assistance for long distance. I think my grandmother would have been perfectly happy to continue using the operator to call outside her local area and be able to yack with somebody across town using a shorter number.
My wife grew up in Leeds, Alabama. She was born in 1940 and remembers calling her grandmother. She would pick up the phone and say “7J” and the operator would make the connection.
Before the 1960’s, the only way to make a long-distance call was to dial the operator. It was a good idea to know the number at the other end, not because it would cost anything to find out but because it was more like you probably wouldn’t get through. :eek:
The number of digits required is really a factor of what kind of ‘switching machine’ you are connected to, and what kind of network you are dialing into. Thusly, when dialing someone in your office or building, you may only have to dial a few digits–the machine, or centrex only needs that much info to route your call. When calling out to the world, the machine (‘step-by-step’, ‘crossbar’ ‘5ESS’, etc) that is collecting your digits needs more info to send the call to wherever it’s going.
My grandmother’s phone number in Philadelphia was, during WWII (as far back as I recall) SHE-3277. (Stood for Sherbrooke, which was actually what that section of west Philly was called) and later “changed” to SH3-3277. They added Sh7 and doubtless others. Later, it would have “changed” again to 743. My understanding was that originally telephone exchanges could handle 4 digit numbers was that the largest plugboard that one person could handle was 100 by 100. And that is quite a stretch even so since those telephone plugs were big and even if you packed them as tight as possible, I am sure you couldn’t space them closer than about 1/2" so that 100 by 100 was over 4’ by 4’.
Later on with automatic switching, this didn’t matter, but the pattern was set. Sometime next year, I will have to get used to 10 digit dialing.
BTW, after 40 years of all number dialing, I find I can no longer handle dialing by letters. So if some hotellier tells me that their number is holiday, I want to know what is that in numbers.
Northfield, MN (home of my alma mater) had 5-digit dialing up to about my senior year (ca. 1990). The town had two exchanges, 663 and 645, so all you needed to dial was 3-xxxx or 5-xxxx.
When I was growing up, our phone number was 2573-R, and my grandparents was 5280. You asked the operator for the number you wanted.
Direct dialing, and seven-digit numbers, came in in the mid-1960s. There were a few small-town local exchanges that converted around that time where you only needed to dial the four digit subscriber number within the local exchange.
Manhattan, MT had five-digit dialing within the exchange up until at least 1990 (which is when we moved.) I also know, from an old newspaper I found, that the (often-dropped) “28” at the beginning of those numbers used to be “AT”, but I never figured out what the “AT” stood for.
The University of Minnesota has (unless they’ve changed it very recently) five-digit dialing for all on-campus numbers. I suspect that that was a slightly different deal there, though, since you had to dial 8 before all off-campus numbers, and incoming numbers had a different ring depending on if they were coming from on- or off-campus. The telephone system there was more like a huge company’s than a small town’s.
Nobody else I went to college had even heard of five-digit dialing for an entire town! I wonder if any towns like that still exist, too.
