When did phone companies switch phone exchanges from beginning with words to numbers (like BElmont 5-0600 to 235-0600)? Why did they do this? Did the words always have something to do with the geographic area covered by the phone exchange?
I can remember a radio commercial here in Baltimore using the number above, including the Belmont, well into the 70’s.
I can remember as a small child in the Chicago whitebread suburbs about 1960 having to re-learn my phone number at the mysterious and still unexplained fiat of Ma Bell, from “hopkinsninesixohsixtwo” to “foursixninesixohsixtwo”,
In the '60s.
Because the words were merely for the psychological benefit of the customers, the words were unweildy compared to numbers, and some number combinations didn’t lend themselves easily to words.
No.
Like Duck Duck Goose, it was around the very early 1960s for me also. We went from Applegate 8- 2781 (isn’t that a warm and cozy sounding way to tell someone your phone number) to 278-2781.
I just checked the morgue of the paper I edit and the number prefixes started kicking in the ads about '61 and are almost exclusively numbers by '63.
As for the words having something to do with the section of town in which one lived. That seems to be exactly the case. The older parts of the town were indeed known as SHirewood and APplegate and the like, and Ma Bell merely adapted those so when you were asking for a person in a specific section of a city, the operator would only have to go to that section of her board to connect you with that operator who would in turn connect you with that number.
As “directing dialing” became possible (and then almost mandatory) the numbers became the dominant factor.
TV
In case anyone doesn’t know, the first two letters of the exchange coincided with the numbers on the dial that eventually replaced them.
In case anyone doesn’t know, the first two letters of the exchange coincided with the numbers on the dial that eventually replaced them.
AS for geographic connection, the only possible answer is sometimes in some places, and not others in other places.
Where I lived, in some places the exchanges were actually named after the street the telephone office was located on. In others it was something descriptive (CEntral was the main exchange for downtown). I think some of them (AXminster) were just made up to get a word.
It was the word problem combined with automatic switching that doomed the old names. My home prefix used to be WOodlawn 1, 3 or 5. When they needed more numbers, the phone company would have had to invent a new name (YOrktown, anyone?) which probably would have confused more people than just calling it 96x.
That was the case in my area. Our number, in Saratoga, Calif. (in honor of the time period, I am not using the as-yet-not-developed two-letter state abbreviations), had a UNion prefix, although there was no geographical connection. The next town over, Los Gatos (“the cats,” the name taken from an earlier hacienda) had a geographical prefix, ELgato. My grandparents, nearby in San Jose, had prefixes of CYpress and AXminster, neither one geographical. Earlier, my mother lived in an apartment in the Sunset district of San Francisco during WWII, where her prefix was WEst. I suppose that can count as geographical.
Also, it would have become more complicated as increased demand for new telephone numbers required the telephone company to abandon the geographical limits of “exchanges,” causing them to overlap.
There’s a lot of information on old time phone exchanges at the Telephone Exchange Name Project. According to them, exchanges were phased out in the 60s, but were still in some areas in the early 70s.
And while the geographic area was a common way of describing things (my home town, Southold, was SOuthold 5), in cities there were too many exchanges, so that the phone company used exchanges that were chosen arbitrarily.
Sometimes the exchanges were chosen to fit into a particular scheme. Here in Schenectady, the exchange names began with D, E, and F so that all phone numbers began with “3” (FRanklin, ENterprise, ELgin, DIckens, etc.) Albany phone exchanges began with G, H, and I (GRidley, HEmlock, IVanhoe, etc.)
There were also problems with using names, like the MUrray Hill exchange in NYC, which people thought was MH instead of MU.
Of course, there’s no reason why you can’t use the old system of exchanges to this day, as long as the person you’re talking to understands how they work. I noticed some time ago that many phone numbers that you see on TV (such as when the camera focuses on a phone book) are written as Klondike5-1234 so that the 555 exchange does not immediately mark the number as fake. And anyone from Northeastern Ohio can tell you that if you need aluminum siding, the number to call is “Garfield 1-2323,” because the company’s commercials played a jingle with that number into the 90’s at least.
–Cliffy
My grandparents’ number was LAketown 8 - 6309, which is odd because the Laketown neighborhood of Springfield is a good couple of miles from where my grandparents lived.
Just to complicate matters, my grandmother’s phone number in Danville, Virginia in around 1950 was 6089-J. Now this was a booming metropolis of about 75-100,000 people at that time(my guess, only).
My home phone in 1948 was JE(fferson) 2-5078. Still is my parent’s number today. There was a Jefferson Street in the general 3 mile vicinity at the time. Prefixes over the whole area were JE.
This will (heh) ring a bell for Chicagoans:
[deep bass voice] HUdson 3-2700 [/foghorn] - Boushelle Carpet.
But this system is still used, in a way:
“Call 1-800-NEW-CARS for the best deals.”
The letters and numbers are still interchangable, as far as I’m concerned. I find it funny to hear some of the old-timers around here still say that their number is “LYceum 2-3000” or whatever.
PEnnsylvania 6-5-0-0-0!
The neighborhood I live in was developed after they phased out exchange names (the only exchanges we’ve verified in town are in the downtown area, pre-'70s-sprawl), but I still give mine as having an exchange (CYpress) whenever possible. My cell phone’s exchange, were I to give it one, would be GIlmer, which is the name of a road nearby which leads to a town of the same name, and is thus geographically relevant.
Back in my upstate New York hometown, there’s a cab company near the railroad tracks that’s been in the same office for fifty years or so. They have a neon sign hanging from the building that gives the phone number without an exchange. That’s still their telephone number, too, you just have to remember to add the exchange. (The town is 82, with suffixes of 8-XXXX or 2-XXXX. I don’t know what the word used for it was.)
In my collection of vintage postcards there are several local (here in Texas) ones that have phone numbers of five digits or less. “Telephone K-903” or simply “Telephone 27.”
I had heard (just a distant memory, no cite) that the reason for the word/number combination was the belief that most people could not remember 7 digit numbers. Remembering a word and five numbers was considered easier. Of course, at the time that phone numbers went to 7 digits this may have been true for most people. I would believe that the US is a much more number oriented society now than it was fifty years ago.
samclem, I believe that numbers like 6089-J (and others with letters on the end) referred to party lines–the letter would tell the operator which party she should ring on that line (each party had a special ring).
racinchikki, I grew up in a town where you could dial numbers within town by just dialing the last five digits. This worked up until at least 1990, which is when we moved. People often wrote down their numbers this way. As a telephone operator, I still sometimes have older people give me five-digit numbers to dial…this is more common, BTW, than people giving me numbers with exchange names.
I was amazed to find, while walking one day in my neighborhood not too long ago, a small sign on a telephone pole with a ZEnith number on it (to call before you dig, in this case.) Now, ZEnith isn’t an exchange (there’s no “Z” on the phone, after all). In the days before toll-free (800, etc.) numbers, companies who wanted to pay automatically for their customers’ calls could get a ZEnith number. The customer dials the operator, asks for a connection to the number, and the operator dials it and charges it “autocollect”–charged to the party being called without all the announcing the call, “Do you accept the charges” stuff (just like a toll-free number is automatically charged). Many ZEnith numbers still work–we still have a list of ZEnith numbers (with their corresponding toll-free numbers that are what we actually dial) in our database in case someone needs to dial one (I think I’ve dialed one so far–pretty rare), but I had never encountered them in “real” life (outside of work) before.