In the 1950’s, phone numbers were changing all over North America to become two letters followed by 5 numbers (many were only 4 numbers). The proposal was to have them converted to all numbers (7) sometime in the future (it was in the 1962-64 time frame, mostly).
In my experience (browsing out-of-town phone books while on vacation, checking out historical phone exchange Web sites, etc.) the two letters used for the phone exchange were always short for something (usually indicating the area of the city in which they were located). For example, New York City had BEekman (street), JErome (street), CHelsea (area), and PEnnsylvania (station), etc. clearly indicating where they were.
However - Buffalo did it differently. According to this 1960 announcement, the new letter combinations couldn’t be used to form words (e.g. TF, TT, TX, etc.). I guess they knew that they would become all-numeric in a few years and weren’t worried about the short-term effect. Did any other cities do it this way?
The two-letter codes indicated a particular telephone exchange, and were chosen where possible to suggest the identity of the exchange. So if a New York City number started with PE-, it meant not just that the associated address was in the vicinity of Pennsylvania Station, but that it was served by the the telephone exchange of that name.
But you can only take this so far; with more and more phones grouped into larger and larger call areas, you pretty soon get to the stage where there is more than one telephone exchange with a name that might be suggested by PE-, and where a new exchange can’t get any of the two-letter codes that might suggest its name because they’re all in use already. At that point you might abandon the attempt to match up codes with exchange names and, to avoid confusion, you might actively discourage matching.
Named exchanges in my Los Angeles area suburban infancy had zero linkage to locales. LYcoming, NAtional, YUkon, TUrner - no communities, features, or avenues in their service areas bore those names. Quite arbitrary ISTM.
Not arbitrary. Schenectady, for example had FRanklin and EXeter. They’re not named for neighborhoods or places - but they all begin with “3” so when they went to all numbers, the exchanges for the city all began with the same digit.
It depended on the size of the exchange. If there were less than 10k customers in the area, they will all fit into one exchange. In my area, every town had its own exchange and you only had to dial the last four digits to be connected within the town. (A town near us had 3- digit numbers, but you had to go through an operator).
I have never heard of exchanges that couldn’t be represented by words. Most cities just went directly to all numbers.
The Wikipedia article on telephone exchange names indicates that, in 1955, AT&T created and circulated a standardized list of suggested names for exchanges, though I imagine that, in cities in which previously-existing exchange names were well-known (or named after city neighborhoods or streets), those local versions endured.
When my family moved to Green Bay in 1975, though it was years after the exchange names had been phased out, the hardware store we bought still had lots of old tchotchkes with the store’s phone number on it using the exchange name – it was “HEmlock 7”, and I see that “HEmlock” was on AT&T’s suggested list.
Only the largest cities were dialing exchange names prior to WWII. In the late 1940s, big cities shifted from an exchange name (spoken to the operator) or 3 letters followed by 4 digits to “2 + 5” dialing, a Bell System standard. 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 seamless transition wasn’t possible—but more importantly, new third digits could be introduced to expand capacity. In big cities, the exchange names had begun as names of physical offices, and thus were typically locally meaningful, but in the postwar era as 7-digit numbers spread to most towns, the Bell System had a standardized list they typically drew from.
I’ve never heard of anything like this Buffalo scheme, but it looks to me like they’re shifting all Buffalo numbers to be in a narrow range with 8 as the first digit, probably so all Northern New York could have subscriber long-distance dialing instead of asking the long-distance operator to connect you to “Hamburg 2308” or “Rochester MAin 4306.” You can see how it would be a problem if nearly every small city in that part of the state had a Main or Central exchange, named back in the 1890s.
It’s most puzzling that they didn’t go directly to 7 digits, but perhaps 1920s-era Bell Labs research about how many digits people could easily remember was still considered current science.
I grew up in the 1950’s and 1960’s in the San Fernando Valley area of Los Angeles. The two most prominent phone exchanges in the area were EMpire and STate – the two together in the region always seemed, to me, to be named after New York.
We live in Honolulu for one of those years, in 1966-1967. Phones there were still more primitive – they had mostly six-digit numbers and some phone numbers were only five digits. I never understood how a phone system could work when the numbers didn’t even have a consistent number of digits.
Olympia had FLeetwood, named for the Fleetwood Building downtown (itself named for an early settler family) which was the local HQ of the telephone company back in the day. “The Fleetwoods”, a pop trio from the early '60s who topped the Billboard charts with “Mr. Blue” and “Come Softly To Me”, took their name from the exchange.
You can still get a phone number starting with 35 if you’ve got a landline and you’re located in or near downtown.
Montreal had some phone exchanges that were bilingual - in French, it was LAfontaine; in English, it was LAncaster. Likewise - with ORleans and ORchard. It made no difference when all-digit dialling was introduced.
Local businesses sometimes named themselves after a nearby phone exchange and/or building - e.g. there was an “Elwood Laundry” across the street from the ELwood exchange building, as well as a couple of other “Elwood” businesses. 70 years later - you can still get a “Hemlock” or “Pontiac” taxi - named after the local phone exchanges which no longer exist.
I’m just a bit younger than you. All the phone numbers I grew up with were either 7 digits (when dialing within the area code) or 10 digits (when dialing outside the area code). It never dawned on me to ask (and in retrospect I’m rather ashamed of that fact) how the system knew which kind of number I was dialing; why didn’t the system always start processing after the seventh digit?
When they started requiring a “1” prefix to use the area code, that’s when I learned their trick: Area codes ALWAYS had a “1” or “0” as the second digit, and exchanges NEVER did. This made a very simple rule for the system: If the second digit is “1” or “0”, then there will be ten altogether, otherwise there will be only seven.
I suspect that something similar was going on when you were in Honolulu: The phone numbers were encoded in such a way that before you got to the sixth digit, the system already knew whether to expect 5 or 6.
Nowadays, of course, all this has changed. The area codes can be any three digits, and the phone numbers can be any seven digits, and although some area codes and “exchanges” are reserved for special functions, none of that is tied to geography. (I know people whose cell phone number has an area code from where they lived almost 20 years ago.) And when you’re not on a landline, the last step is “send”, so they aren’t even restricted to a number of digits, which is why we can send text messages to 5- or 6-digits “phone numbers”.
Aside: When I was in college, the pep band traveled to any tournament the basketball team was playing at. One year, it was in New York, and we were staying at the Pennsylvania Hotel. Well, of course everyone in the band knew the phone number for the Pennsylvania Hotel-- It’s Pennsylvania 6-5000, as immortalized in song.
Except when we tried to actually call it, most of us abbreviated it as PA, not PE.
Although the Post Office (who ran the telephone network) had started installing automatic exchanges in 1912, the original Strowger relays couldn’t handle the high volumes of a big city exchange and it was not until 1927 that London exchanges were automated.
Before that, London was divided into exchanges that roughly coincided with the London Boroughs although the names were mostly different. Battersea was Wandsworth, Belgravia and Covent Garden were both Westminster for example, so a caller wanting a number in Westminster would ask the operator for Covent Garden or 123. After 1927, the exchanges were given 3 digit numbers that mostly corresponded with their names. Euston 1234 could be dialled as 387-1234. it is still likely that a (7)387 number is located in the Euston area.
Outside London, a similar system operated although today, the codes for a town may well bear no relationship to the letters on a dial although some do. My home town, which should be RED (733) was 527 followed by a 5 digit number. the full code was (02) for the Birmingham area, followed by 527 12345 when I moved here in the 70s. Later on, since they were fast running out of numbers, they added a 1 to the Birmingham code, making it 021 and later still, 0121. They also added a 5 to the front of my number, making the full number 0121 (5)12345. I can dial another number on my local exchange without the prefix, so 512346 would work on a landline but not on a mobile.
The way people answer their phones has changed completely over the years. In the early days, a servant might say “Mr Churchill’s residence.” Later on people were ‘taught’ to give their name and number - “Belgravia 123, Mr Churchill speaking.” Then the number was dropped and people just gave their names and now, most people just say “Hello”, partly as a result of all the telephone scams.
That’s easy to do. If the first digit is an “8” (for example), then you expect 5 digits total; otherwise, you expect 6.
Similar to the 2nd digit of 0 or 1 meaning 9 more follow (due to area code), non-0 or 1 means 5 follow (no area code). Since up to the area code imposition, no numbers had a 0 or 1 as the second digit, there was no ambiguity or conflict.
Old Simpsons episodes used to name some of their 555 numbers as KL5 (“Klondike Five”) so I got interested in that. I’m too young to have seen this in-person. (In fact, that system vanished before the Simpsons even aired.)
About ten years ago I had to call the UK for a project. Some of their phone numbers are six digits, and some seven (and you always have to call the area code). Because the numbers aren’t all the same length, they don’t have a concept of telephone rhythm. It just felt so strange asking for a phone number and just getting a string, and wondering if I missed a digit.
If you are using a system where you have to dial 9 to call out, does anyone know how to dial *69?
In the 1950’s and 60’s our phone number started with ME5. I always took the ME to stand for Meddaugh Road, which was nearby; or possibly the Meddaugh family, which had been there a while. But I’m not sure, thinking about it now, whether I was told that or assumed it. There wasn’t very much of Meddaugh Road – it was a mostly one-lane dead-end; so in retrospect it seems odd to have named a telephone exchange for it, though I suppose that might have been the end of that branch of the phone line, or might have been the people who originally argued to get a phone line out to them with the result that others in that area got phone service also.
When I grew up, our exchange was “COlfax 1” (261), and I had always been curious about the significance of the word/name “Colfax”. It turns out to have been among AT&T’s recommended list, as seen in Wikipedia’s list of telephone exchange names.
As an example, when I was in elementary school in the 40s, our number was GRA(nite) 3277. Then the number of exchanges started to skyrocket and GRA was split into several exchanges. We were assigned GR4 but there were also GR2 (= GRA) and GR6. When I moved to NY in 1962, I saw my first unpronounceable, TT7. Then it became all number dialiing, then area codes arrived, then country codes. But now cell phone numbers no longer have anything to do with geography since people keep them when they move.