I’m wondering about those old-style telephone numbers from before touchtone dialing was popular. The ones that feature a name followed by 1 plus 4 digits, like Pennsylvania 6-5000, Venture 3-1234,. If I was back in 1949 and wanted to call up my friend Norma, how would I dial her number? What about calling long distance say, Los Angeles to Chicago? And at what point were those numbers replaced with the 3+4 digit numbers now common?
Locally, the first two letters of the exchange name were translated to numbers (the same way numbers stand for letters on current phones). Thus, VEnture 3-1234 would be 833-1234 (V=8, E=3 just like today). Some numerical exchanges still reflect this (for instance, my home town exchange was 765, from SOuthold 5).
PEnsylvania 6-5000 would be 736-5000 (and still reaches the same business – the hotel where Glenn Miller played). There was occasional confusion as to what to dial – the MUrray Hill exchange in New York City was 68 (M=6, U=8) though some tried MH – 64.
Long distance calls generally went through an operator who would contact another operator in the city you’re trying to call. There may have even been some overlap with area codes when they were introduced for direct dialing.
The change started in the 60s. I recall we lost our exchange letters when I was in college, so that was around 1970-72.
You looked at the dial on your phone, and put your finger in the hole that corresponded to the letters in the first two letters of the name, swung your finger clockwise to the silver metal guard, then removed your finger. Thus PEnnsylvania 6-5000 is 736-5000.
Before sometime in the 1960s, when direct long-distance dialing became possible pretty much everywhere, to make a long distance call, you dialled 0 (zero, not letter O) and asked for the long distance operator. You told the the LD operator that you wanted to call Pennsylvania 6-5000 in New York City. And in a few minutes you’d be talking to Glenn Miller in the ballroom of the Pennsylvania Hotel.
(On preview, what RealityChuck said.)
Another tidbit to RealityChuck’s excellent answer … If you were in the same exchange as the number you were calling, you could leave off the exchange prefix and dial only 5 numbers. For example, if your phone number was PEnnsylvania 8-1234, you could call PEnnsylvania 6-5000 by dialing only 6-5000. It doesn’t seem like a big thing, but rotary dialing was S-L-O-W and any advantage was welcome.
I hated numbers with lots of 0s or 9s because they took forever to dial. Yes, I tap my foot in front of the microwave. What of it?
Combining your two examples, some years back the college band I was in was staying at the Pennsylvania Hotel for a tournament, and the folks dealing with the hotel (who of course knew the phone number from the song) tried to dial 726-5000, for PA (Pennsylvania).
It was also fun to pick up the phone and hear other people talking, and waiting for them (usually your neighbors) to finish up before you could make a call.
The number of digits needed for local calls depended on your exchange. That ability went away with the implementation of the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) in the 50s and 60s. This was introduced to allow DDD - Direct Distance Dialing. As mentioned, before then you had to make long distance calls with the assistance of operators, and with the patchwork of exchanges with different dial plans, it could take a long time to get through.
That didn’t stop people fom bitching about having to dial seven numbers for local calls when the change was made.
When I was very young, the town next to us had no dial phones at all. The phones actually had no dial – you’d pick it up and and operator would answer, and then you’d place the call.
Same thing for calling in – you’d dial a number to get the town’s operator and then tell them the number you wanted. And some of the numbers had only three digits – they technically began with zero, but when you called the operator, for 0123, you could say, “get me 123, please.”
We could call people in our exchange by just dialing four numbers.
That was a party line - a whole different topic, which we’ve discussed before. Party lines often DID require operator assistance for long distance, in order to bill the appropriate subscriber. Party lines were still common in rural areas long after DDD came in. In some areas, people may have chosen party line service because it was cheaper. In rural areas, with extremely long loops, the phone company sometimes did not want to run enough copper to give each subscriber an individual line. More local multiplexing solutions eventually took care of that.
Since the OP mentioned 1949, I’m pretty sure that at that time there were quite a few people, especially in rural areas, that didn’t even have a dial telephone. You turned that little crank on the side of the phone, which alerted Central (the local operator), and told her (it was always a woman) the number of the person you wanted to be connected to. Depending on the size of the exchange, it might be something like 2932X, but in any case fewer than seven digits. In really small communities, you could probably just tell Central the name of the person you wanted to reach.
The operator sat at a console like this one. The call came in on one of the lines on the horizontal panel in front of her. She threw a switch for that line to talk to you, and when she got the number from you, she picked up the quarter-inch phone plug for the incoming line and touched the tip of the plug to the ring of the jack for that phone number, located on the vertical panel in front of her. (There was a unique jack for every phone number in that exchange, and every jack was duplicated for every operator position in the exchange! Here’s a close-up view of a small version of the kind of console I’m talking about.)
If she heard a click when she touched the ring, that meant that the line was busy, and she’d suggest you call back later. If there was no click, she’d plug the line into the jack and throw the switch to the “ring” position a few times, to ring the recipient’s phone. When the recipient picked up, a light would come on above the jack, indicating that the connection had been made, she’d throw the switch back to the off position, and stand by for the next incoming call. (If she didn’t throw the switch to off, she could listen in on your conversation.) When one of the two parties hung up, the light over the jack would go out, and she’d unplug the incoming line and free it up for another call. If she failed to do so, or if the incoming caller didn’t hang up, it could prevent the recipient from dialing out!
It’s fairly easy to see one of the problems with this system. The number of outgoing lines that could fit on a console that an operator could reasonably reach was relatively small. I don’t know the number, but I’d be surprised if it was much more than a couple thousand or so. I don’t know from my own experience how they handled large cities; presumably your operator would connect to another one, and pass on your request, but I’m not sure about that. But obviously the complexity and labor intensiveness of this system put heavy pressure on The Phone Company to develop automatic exchanges and direct local dialing.
How do I know about all this? Believe it or not, as late as 1983, the small college I attended had one of those old plugboard consoles, and I learned how to use it. It was pretty cool. Real live, original, steampunk, before anyone had coined that term.
I wonder what were the last communities in the United States to have REAL six-digit phone numbers. Growing up as a kid in the 1970s, the pre-printed phone number on the black Western Electric phone at home read TF-9796. Thing is, it also had the 716 area code printed on it too! Looked kind of like …
Area
Code 716
TF-9796
The actual number was seven digits, but apparently the number on the dial was even older; a digit was added after the"TF" (83) sometime in the 1960s, according to the 'rents.
Even into the 1990s, I would see a lot of business trucks that were relatively new with old-fashioned letter exchange numbers printed on them. Then again, Buffalo is in a time warp …
Such as Allan Sherman’s Let’s All Call Up AT&T and Protest to the President March.
In the sixties the exchange required 5 digit numbers to be called in our town, but your 7 digit number worked too. The party lines were mandatory, because they didn’t have enough lines for people to have a private phone. This was the main reason people my age say what they have to say and get off the phone. You had it drilled in your head that the other party might want to call out. You only interrupted their call if it was an emergency. You hung up if they were on the line, unless you were one of the nosy neighbors. They quietly listened in on your conversations. You’d hear something and ask your party if they heard something, because you were likely being listened to. I hated party lines. For a number of years as things changed , you could call long distance free if you knew how. It had to do with tones being used internally by the phone company, because the customers only had rotary phones. You basically cheated the phone companies by knowing how their system ran. The average person on the street didn’t know how it was done. This has ceased to be possible to do for about 3 decades now.
Ah, the 2600 Hz tone. To be less elliptical, by sending a tone down the phone line with a frequency of precisely 2600 Hz, you shifted the phone system into a special mode normally only accessible to phone company employees. From that mode, you could indeed get free long distance and other goodies, simply by knowing other little details about Ma Bell’s internal workings. (Amusingly enough, a little plastic whistle given away free in boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal hit the tone dead-on.)
This is the essence of phone phreaking. This occupied the lives of too many young geeks 20-30 years ago.
Various tricks became impossible at different times in different places, as old technology was slowly replaced and as Ma Bell caught on. They’re all definitively defunct now, as I understand it.
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs made blue boxes, pieces of hardware that facilitated phreaking, before they founded Apple. Illegal as hell, but apparently profitable.
(I’m describing this so candidly here because it isn’t useful information anymore. The technology has moved on and this is purely historical.)
I was in Rhode Island in the early 1970’s, and we were able to dial the last 5 numbers for the 783 and 788 exchanges that serviced our town, but we were also able to direct dial long distance. Of course, we also had a lovely General Store, the guys in plaid playing checkers on a card table in the corner, and the good old dog keeping sentry over it all.
Ahhh, the good old days 
I found a booklet published in 1939 with recipes for using your new GE Refrigerator. It has the phone numbers for some New York GE offices. The ones for New Rochelle and White Plains had THREE letters (NEW & WHI respectively) followed by FOUR numbers.
Apparently the two letters & five numbers system was not in place everywhere back then.
And the bitching starts up all over again when an area (like Charlotte) gets an new area code added to its existing area code, necessitating 10-digit dialing for all calls.
Frankly, I like Rita Rudner’s idea. If you’re only off by one digit when dialing a wrong number, you should at least get someone who knows the person you’re trying to reach.
I admit it, I’m just outside of Buffalo and I’m in the time warp.
Last week I needed to call a local buisness, the catalog I was using of theirs is old and tattered. The phone number on the front was TX6- xxxx. The other guy in the office was looking at me like I was from Mars when I went to dial it. Still works, like showing a kid a 33rpm record.
And if the operator was rushed or careless, didn’t notice the click, and plugged you in anyway, you were suddenly in what is now called a ‘conference call’ – you were in a three-way connection with the 2 people who were already talking. Rather confusing if you didn’t expect it. Also, it often didn’t work well – the system wasn’t designed for that, and the volume dropped so it was hard to hear each other.
OT: Buffalo, also, is one of those cities where, despite its size, it’s still really easy to tell where someone lives, and thus their social status, bu the phone exchange. If it’s the city or suburban neighborhoods adjacent to the city line, numbers start with “8”. First ring suburbs are “6”. Outer ring are “7” ot “9”. There’s a few post-716 split numbers that don’t follow the traditional pattern, but generally speaking the vast majority of Buffalonians will have an 8XX or 6XX exchange.
My parents went from 83X (Kensington neighborhood, now a very rough part of town) to 689 (Williamsville) in 1992. They were really excited about their new phone number; 689 in Buffalo is like having a 90210 zip code in California, or a 212 area code in NYC.