Rotary dial was long gone when I came here in 2000. Land-line phones usually do not have anything besides numbers labeled.
Cell phones have both roman letters and hiragana symbols marked on them for texting. Exactly what is where depends on the manufacturer, but the basics are the same on practically any handset:
1 あ (and usually basic punctuation) 2 ABC か 3 DEF さ
4 GHI た 5 JKL な 6 MNO は
7 PQRS ま 8 TUV や 9 WXYZ ら
*(email/internet shortcut entry) 0 わをん #(additional punctuation)
I think depending on the household you can still see rotary phones in use in Taiwan.
'Twas similar in the States, BUtterfield-8 being the most famous, I think, and there was a Jimmy Stewart movie CALL NORTHSIDE 777.
In Dubai, the phones either had Romance letters or none.
The letters were dropped from British phones in the 1970s when it was no longer necessary to use them (a blank ring being fitted around the dial in place of the old letter ring e.g. this 746 Series http://www.soniarusvintagetelephones.com/USERIMAGES/STA60030(5).JPG ). From the '90s most phones began to reaquire them, even though they were little used at that stage.
Here is a 706 Series made by Standard Telephones & Cables with the letter ring http://www.soniarusvintagetelephones.com/USERIMAGES/STA60028-1(1).JPG
I gave my India team a 1-800-BITE-ME type number to call, and they had no idea what I was talking about. I have to translate the BITE-ME to numerals or they can’t do it.
gimmicks like BITE-ME have not (so far) taken off here. Indeed most retailers of goods and services still expect you to pay for the phone call you make to them to offer them business and some charge extra to make money on it.
Oh, if only that bright reflection didn’t cover the 6! I’m wondering what letters are next to it. M and N? On our phones, 6 traditionally has M, N, and O, but I notice that O and Q are on the zero in the pic.
Edit: and where’s the Z?
There was only M and N. Z wasn’t used at all. In those days Post Office Telephones could impose its standard on the manufacturers, and sell it to some foreign countries like Australia. Now BT is just one player in the market.
A glance at a modern phone shows M,N & O on 6 and W,X,Y & Z on 0. No doubt there has been international standardization since those days.
Before the 1970’s Post Office Telephones had just four suppliers (GEC, STC, TMC and Plessey). Equipment orders were doled out to these “big four” without any form of competitive tendering. This included everything from complete telephone exchanges right down to telephone instruments.
reputedly it was because the Plessey factory was in Harold Wilson’s constituency
I remember hearing that you could dial a phone using only the hook if you had a phenomenally steady hand and could pulse the hook manually as if it were a rotary phone. This sounds plausible if you could pull it off, but I don’t know if it’s true.
That cosy set-up had been in operation years before Harold Wilson came to power. Anyway the other companies were scattered all over the country. GEC (my old firm) was in Coventry, while STC and TMC were located in the London area. Plessey had another factory in Beeston, Nottingham .
Yes, it’s true. If you could match the make and break pulses to that of the dial.
You could, and it was a feasible way of using public call boxes without paying (at one time) when they were still on loop-disconnect dialling.
There are two different issues here. One is old. rotary-dial, phones which had letters in America because central offices were identified by letters chosen by the phone company so the entire alphabet was not needed.
A totally different issue is the newer mobile phones used for texting where the entire alphabet is needed and even more letters in other languages (ñ, á, é, í, ó, ú, ü, ö, , etc).
So modern phones use whatever combination they need depending on the intended market, etc.
I’ve done this! When I was a kid. My sister and I were visiting relatives and were really, really bored. There was some three number combination you could dial to get the current weather from a recorded message. I don’t remember the number, but it may have been 511 or something, I don’t remember anymore.
We tried over and over to “tap” the number on the phone cradle until we got it to work.
As I said, we were really really bored.
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