Just watched this Canadian documentary on Youtube about a murder in Chatham, Ontario in 1988. One shot shows a roadsign saying ‘CHATHAM - This is a 911 community’.
So what does that mean? It can hardly be advertising the fact that 911 is the emergency number for the area, isn’t that standard in Canada and the US?
It wasn’t standard everywhere until maybe the early 1990s. In lots of places (especially small towns) you had to know the number for your local police station or dispatcher.
Yeah, in 1988 it would still be a new thing in most rural areas. They sometimes had signs up to let people know the service had become available.
Darn it, composing a reply and got ninja’d.
From the Wikipedia article: “The number itself, however, did not become widely known until the 1970s, and many municipalities did not have 9-1-1 service until well into the 1980s.”
I grew up in an inner ring suburb of Philadelphia, and to the best of my recollection, we got 911 when I was in high school in the nineties. Before that, the police/fire emergency line was a local 7-digit number.
When I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s, 911 was brand new. Reading Wikipedia makes you think it was ubiquitous decades earlier, but you wouldn’t know it where I lived. Maybe New York City had it back then, I don’t know. But it was a slow roll out, and I’m not sure it’s 100% complete yet.
I didn’t get a 911 address until 1997.
I recall living in a smallish city in the late 70s, when TV commercials would tell you to “dial 1-800…”
That didn’t work for us, we didn’t get one-plus dialing for years later.
It’s a community where folks own a lot of Porsches.
Surprising… In the UK the 999 service was introduced in London way back in 1936 after a disastrous fire where people couldn’t get through the switchboards. It had spread to the rest of the country within a decade.
!t was suggested an end number on the dial should be used so it could be found easily by touch in the dark or smoke. 111 was rejected because it could be triggered by faulty equipment or lines rubbing together, so 999 was adopted, even though it took a long time to dial.
Today you can also use 112 which is universal across Europe.
I remember when I was a kid. They used to teach us to dial 0 to get the operator in case of an emergency.
I can’t find numbers for Canada, but in 1987, half of Americans lived in areas that didn’t have 911 (cite).
I left West Texas in 1988, and at that time my town did not have 911.
I think taking a long time to dial was considered a feature not a bug - made it less likely someone would do it by accident. The Australian version was 000, which took even longer to dial (then, of course. Now it makes no odds either way)
Pakistan every place has its own numbers still. They differ by County and district, never mind province.
My town got 911 service about the time “Rescue 911” started airing. I have vague memories of Shatner extolling the virtues of calling 911.
In the United States 9-1-1 was launched in Alabama in the late 1960’s. Currently 9-1-1 is available to over 99% of the population… But that still leaves some fairly large rural areas with little population without 9-1-1 service.
My in-laws, who live on a short street in a smallish Vermont town, had to change their house number from 7 to 29 when 911 was introduced. Didn’t make much sense to me.
Yep. I remember businesses giving out stickers to put on your phone (black, dial, desk unit) that had both the local police & fire department (a separate number) on it.
I believe this means that there are .029 miles between where you first turn onto their road and their home. If so, the change was made to make it easier for emergency services to find their house using GPS.
Yes I believe they do try to make the 911 street numbers coincide with the distance from the beginning of the road. My number was 965 previous to 911, then it changed to 1997, which I believe was 1.997 miles from the start of the road.