That’s interesting. I had never heard that before.
Some of those exchanges have been made famous over time, such as “Butterfield-8,” as in John O’Hara.
And, of course, my favorite, AND still today, the phone number for the Pennsylvania Hotel in New York City …
(Just played this recently too, not only ran down the bass line but triangle solo for the ringer!)You can give people two letters as the start of your number now. The only reason people stopped using letters was that there were more exchanges than reasonable letter combinations. This required no change to equipment.
If I remember my telephone class correctly, exchanges corresponded to central offices and short numbers were calls within the central office. That’s just like the way you can call within your pbx system at work using fewer than 7 or 10 digits today. Electronic switches today can handle a lot more than one exchange’s worth of numbers, but in the old mechanical days they could only get so big.
When I was growing up into the 60s, the town next door to us had, in essence, three-digit numbers.
You also didn’t dial direct. You’d call the operator and then give the number. Three digits were fine, and I’m pretty sure one- and two-digit numbers existed. Later, they added zeroes before the existing numbers to make it four-digits.
If you lived there, you’d pick up the phone and get the operator. The phones had no dials, just a blank place in the front. Here’s an example.
Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police in London, famously had the number WHI 1212.
Back in the 60s, I took an Australian girl to a post office so that she could call her parents back home. We queued at a counter and she paid (quite a lot as I recall) for a few minutes. We then sat on a bench for some time until a voice on a loudspeaker called her to a booth where she could pick up a receiver and talk to her mother. The whole performance took the best part of an hour for a two minute call.
I seem to remember that Manhattan’s exchange was TUxedo. Mine in the Jersey suburbs was PIgrim.
I guess you could, but… 
In the 1950’s-60’s, there was only one local exchange here. Although everyone’s number was officially 7 digits (area codes were still foreign), since the first 3 were the same for everyone, you only needed to dial the last 5. Dialing “3” let the switch know that the next 4 digits were in the same exchange. So everyone was known only by the last 4 digits.
It got a little complicated in the 1980’s, 1990’s, when you didn’t know if you should dial a “1” plus the local 7, or “1” plus the area code plus the local 7, or the last 5 only, or what? If you used the wrong sequence, you were rudely informed of your error, and what you should have dialed. I never figured out – if they knew what you should have dialed, why didn’t they dial that for you?
To this day, I can go into the local video rental store (yes, we still have one) and rent a movie by giving the last 4 digits of my phone number to look up the account.
I live in a rural county where all of the land lines start with the same 3 digits. It’s common to give folks your number only using the last 4 digits, particularly at local stores such as “the” tire store.
It depends. In small area 2 or 3 numbers depending on how many subscribers. Also depended on how the local phone company designated numbers. Some would assign a number according to when you subscribed. 1st customer was #1 hundredth customer 100. Some companies by area and number of phones in area. Some companies by type of line, line number, and then phone number. When I was a kid our phone number was 23f11. Stood for 23rd phone on the 11th farmers line. And there were 16 families on that line. And if I remember right our ring was 2 shorts and a long.
And another Famous number is “BR 549” Junior Samples from Hee Haa.
I remember the crank telly also called “Who’s That?, Box on the wall”!
Although i was to young to know the details then, but our phone on the farm was our emergency call for Fire and any other emergency need that was in some respects much more useful than the present day phone system where in the case of Fire or such one would crank the phone with a long continuous ring thereby alerting all the neighbors who would come a running!!!
Back in the '60’s my Dad did some scrapping and got a truck load of those old Wall telly’s. He would have had a much nicer retirement had he held on to them instead of scrapping them! must have been more than 400 of them and we had several of those old crank magnetos to play with for years.
When I was growing up, we lived in FLeetwood, and my grandparents lived in REpublic and BIshop.
In the early 70s in suburban Boston we had a single exchange in our town. If you were calling local you just had to dial ‘3’ (the last digit in our exchange) and the 4 digit number. That went away sometime around 1980.
That’s interesting, in that I don’t recall hearing two words used to represent the first two letters in those days. Our phone number was MOhawk 8-4567; meaning MO = 66. The first two letters of the word were used to represent the numbers.
Looking further into this, I see that per wiki’s Telephone Exchange Names, most examples cited use the one word/first two letter format I mention above. And while there is a citation for using MUrray Hill, it represents 68, not 64, because the letters MU are the stand-ins for the number, not the letters MH.
I grew up near Rochester, NY, and as I posted earlier our original number was “766R.” At some point (early-mid '60s?) we went to the regular 7-digit format, “OS(bourne) 1-2031,” which later became 671-2031.
Dang, I didn’t think I’d remember all that but I did. I keep pushing back on senility and so far it’s working. :eek:
In the summer of 1957 my girlfriend and I stayed with her parents at their summer cottage in the Poconos. There were some 30 cottages around a lake and a local private phone system. There were two lines only and the doctor had one and the other 29 people shared the other. Each of the 29 had their own ring combo and if you wanted to talk to one of them, you picked up your phone and, assuming it wasn’t already occupied, you told the operator (who was also the owner of the system) whom you wanted to talk to and she would ring them. I assume you could also call out, but I never saw that.
In Philly, until some time in the late 40s I think we had numbers like GRAnite 3277 (that was our actual phone number) three letters 4 digits. My grandmother’s around the corner was SHE-??? (don’t remember). Then the granite exchange was split into GR2, GR4, and GR6, so it was 2 letters, five numbers. Of course GR2 was the same as GRA. Later on, exchanges like TT were introduced that didn’t stand for anything. At this point, I no longer associate letters with the numbers and a number like 847-evanston is just a nuisance. That used to be the number of the Holiday Inn in Evanston, IL and when I pointed out that it was one letter too long, they said the phone company just ignored that last letter.
There used to be until some time in the 40s a second phone company in Philly called Keystone. Their claim to fame was unlimited service for businesses. Homes could have unlimited service for a fee, but businesses had to pay for every call. So most businesses had a Bell phone and a Keystone phone. It was worth it only for businesses. Some time during (or maybe before the war–I never knew this until my father told me years later), Bell bought them out and closed them down.
Fun fact - The switching system that made dialing possible is was invented by an undertaker. The story is that he believed the local operator was patching his calls to his competitors.
http://www.phworld.org/switch/sxs.htm
I have actually operated a few ‘cord boards’, as late as the early 1980’s. It was in the Air Force, and, like all items that hooked to the telephone system, belonged to the phone company (we only rented it). Solid, bomb proof (well, drop off the back of a truck proof, anyway), easy to set up and use. See http://ka2wft.net/phones/555big.jpg and also it big brother, the 559.
My Grandfather was a shipping manager. Back in the day, telephone trunk lines followed Railway trunk lines, along the rail-line clearance, originally on the railway telegraph poles. (Hence, South Pacific Railway Internal Network Telecommunications, SPRINT, last I heard trying to merge with T-Mobile).
The telephone lines were (then as now again) managed by independent companies. and long-distance calls had to pay each individual leg. This was managed by using standard routing, using standard rates, so that users could be billed using standard rates, and so that operators new how to forward.
When the trunk lines were busy, you had to wait for a free line. When the lines were very busy, they told you to try again some other time.
My grandfather, who knew all rail lines all across the USA in the 1930’s, would talk to the operators and branch around the blockage. You asked each operator to connect to the next operator in a different direction, and worked your way along the back lines. At Christmas, my Grandfather would work his way across the mid-west to Texas, to talk to his brother.
When I was in electronics school, Ontario was digitizing its phone system. But in obscure corners of the province, older systems hung on. My friend’s parents lived in the hamlet of Gilmour, which apparently had the oldest phone exchange in Ontario. The same friend’s sister and her family lived at the end of the road beyond Gilmour, running the marina at a cottage resort on Weslemkoon Lake. Even in the eighties, they had a party line! This was the only time I have ever encountered one.
Fun thread. 
When I was a kid, maybe around 5-6, our phone number began EMpire-4. That’s all I remember. And I do remember it was a party line. This was in Salt Lake City, early 60s.