Early phone numbers

[Moses Yoder]

I found a nice wooden triangular rule today for 50 cents, picked it up. It advertises the Barber-Greene coal handling equipment. Barber-Green was started in 1917 I think and eventually became known for their asphalt paving equipment. I thought the phone number was a little weird, it states "Phone State 5923." I thought this was a 4 digit number and began researching the time when a 4 digit number would have been used and found an interesting tidbit of info I had never heard before.

Phone numbers originally had only one digit, then 2, 3 and so forth as needed. When they realized that 4 digit numbers were not going to be enough they decided to go with 3 letters and 4 numbers, I think this is when letters were added to the dial pad. In order to make the 3 letters easy to remember they assigned a word to it that had those letters as the first three. For example a phone number would be advertised as "Harrison 9676". To dial it you would dial HAR-9676. I am not sure when this started but it was prior to 1930 and ended by 1947. (TELEPHONE NUMBERS) (http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/91/) The telephone number on my rule is "State 5923", or STA-5923. Probably from sometime in the '20s. Of course none of this is researched in depth, it is just my best guess from the info I found.

295454295455

[Howard Garner]

Early 50's we were on a party line with operators. Our number was 10F12. 10F was the plug location in the central office the 12 was 1 long and 2 shorts.
Then they switched us to the 7 "digits" in our case NIagra5-####. My brother still has that number at the same location after all these years.

[Michael Weber]

I understand the theory at the time was that people wouldn't be able to remember more than 5 numbers so they used the leading words (mine was SUnset) as an easier to remember option. So SUnset 22292 instead of 7822292

[Bruce Page]

We were EMpire 24834. That was a long time ago!

[John McClanahan]

In the early '80's I worked for a company located near a small town. The entire town had the same exchange (first 3 digits), so you only needed to dial 4 digits to make a local call.


John

[David Weaver]

About the same time, I was living in a small town (early 1980s) and if you dialed 4 numbers, it just kept in the local exchange. It was a big deal when they had to get a second exchange. Now, they must have at least 5 local exchanges in the same town.

[Myk Rian]

Growing up we had a PArkway number.
In the early 60s you could dial a 3 digit number that wasn't an area code, and be connected to an open line.
We used to get a bunch of kids on after school.

[Mel Fulks]

I worked in an old building a few miles down the road that had the original business name and phone number painted nearly billboard size on it . It was 28 or 29.....technology must have been moving pretty slowly to invest in that. While I was working there it was repainted in a preservation effort. But we saw no increase in business even though the new company used the old name!

[Bill Huber]

Phone numbers have sure changed. As a kid if I was at a friend's house I picked up the phone, turned the crank and told the operator I wanted the Hubers, to call home.
Then things got harder as the area got bigger, I then would have to turn the crank and ask to be connected to 976w2.
But now things have gone back, I take the phone out of my pocket press a button and say call home.
Life is good;-)

[Jim Koepke]

The changes took place at different times in different areas.

Where I grew up went from one Central office to three. My recollection is there were only two or three exchanges at the time BEacon 2, 3 & maybe 4.

Our number changed when the first new one (CApitol 3) opened in the late 1950s. A small town/city to the north of us also went to dial service at that time.

I was working with the phone company when the last one opened in the remote part of the area. That was in the late 1960s. They went from a live operator to dial phones. All the old phones had to be taken out and exchanged for new phones.

This was in the San Francisco bay area.

jtk

[Lee Schierer]

I am not sure when this started but it was prior to 1930 and ended by 1947. (TELEPHONE NUMBERS) (http://www.artlebedev.com/mandership/91/) The telephone number on my rule is "State 5923", or STA-5923. Probably from sometime in the '20s. Of course none of this is researched in depth, it is just my best guess from the info I found.

I was born in 1949 and when I was in first and second grade our phone number was WAL 3452, so there were still locations using the letters as late as 1956-57

[Jerome Stanek]

when I was first married in 1971 ours was Hunter 3 4317 or HU3 4317

[Curt Harms]

The first phone # I can remember was DIamond(34)8-83??. This had to be early '60s.

[Jim Rimmer]

Pre-dial phones our number was 5359J. Dial phones, it became ALpine 5-4486. After I moved away, that exchange became 255 (same keys on dial or touch pad but no letters).

[Jim Laumann]

As a kid, our number was HAmilton 5-2040. This when on to the mid-60's in my area (central MN). Area codes were just starting to come in to play about that time.

Where we live now, you can still make a local call using 5 digits....

[Dan Hunkele]

Our number was FAIrfax-3627 but nobody used the phone excepting mom and dad. Used to be I could tell where someone lived by the exchange number. Today the area code is different from what it was and there is so many exchange numbers it is hard to tell where they live unless they have an old exchange.

[Garth Sheane]

In Manitoba, when I was knee high to a grasshopper, our phone number was 301 ring 21 the actual ring was two longs and a short. It was a favorite past-time for rubbernecks to listen in on the party lines. I seem to recall that on New Years Eve, the "operator" would do something that caused everybody's phone to ring at 12:00 am for a few minutes. I don't really think of 67 as being that old, but I guess it is when you think about how far communication technology has come, along with a lot of other technologies.

[Moses Yoder]

Technology builds upon itself, multiplying exponentially. In 20 years I will be 67, wonder where we will be then? It is just a matter of time until the computer is built into the human brain. It will only take one break through.

[David Helm]

Most of you guys are skipping one level. Our number in 1952 was WA(lnut) 2509. There was no extra number; 2 letters and 4 numbers. This was in a relatively large city (Dayton,Ohio). When they went to 2 letters and 5 numbers was somewhere around 1958 or 9.

[Jerome Stanek]

when I was 5 ours was Shadyside 1 4052 I had to learn it for Kindergarden. that was in Cleveland in 1954

[Greg R Bradley]

295548
One of my Grandfather's business cards with a single digit phone number. Perhaps my father will let us know when they used these numbers.

[Jim Koepke]

Most of you guys are skipping one level.

Well here are three levels:

295551

I sometimes wonder if any of those places are still in business.

I also wonder about "Acme." According to the dictionary it is a noun meaning, "the point at which someone or something is at its best.

I guess after the Roadrunner cartoons it kind of lost favor among serious business interests.

jtk

[Dan Hunkele]

I wonder if it was just a phone book ploy

Acme Auto Repair
Bob's Auto Repair
Cheaper Auto Repair
Etc-Etc

[Kev Williams]

Wasn't all that long ago that some towns with few phones only needed to dial the numbers AFTER their own prefix. Mr. Bradley's neighbor probably only had to dial "9" to call him.

My dad's 1942 yearbook has several 5 digit phone numbers for stores who sponsored ads.

[Karl Andersson]

And of course, don't forget Pensylvania six five oh oh oh...which, according to Wikipedia is the number of the hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan and New York City switched to 7 digits around 1930- ten years before Glen Miller's song. Apparently all businesses around Penn Station in NY had the same PEnnsylvania starter code. In northern VA I had two older advertising tools that the first word was the county or city - one was Arlington 3-### and the other Fairfax.

I'm sure urban areas had "the latest thing" long before more rural areas. I'm just a couple years older than Moses (the OP, not the biblical guy) and the only old phone tech we had in the 70's suburbs was if you flicked the "hang up lever" a few times, you got the operator, and if you dailed "o" during a call, you could make a party line by calling someone else. Well, those, and rotary dials and the now-antique 25-foot long phone cord so my brother could trade whispers with his girlfriends while sitting in his room down the hall with the door closed.

[Jerome Stanek]

BR549 Junior Samples

[Jim Rimmer]

BR549 Junior Samples


An aside to this post. I registered my car in Bryan county Oklahoma back in the 70s. Then the license plates had 2 letter designations for the county and Bryan was BR. The rest of my tag was 1549. Close enough; I had BR-1549.

[Larry Browning]

I remember in the small town where I went to college (in the 70's) there was what we called the "beep line" where there was a particular number you could call that returned a slow busy signal, and you could say things in between the beeps that everyone dialed in could hear. It was a way to meet girls. Sort of a early version of facebook I suppose.

Also, at some point in the late 70's or 80's the phone company decided to convert all the alpha prefixes into the numeric equivalents. So you didn't get a new number, it was just written down as all numeric.

The prefixes were very geographic, so everyone living in your neighborhood had the same prefix. If you moved to a new neighborhood in the same town, you had to get a new phone number. I think even if you moved across the street you had to get a new number. You could tell what part of town someone lived in based on their phone number prefix. This continued even when they dropped the alpha prefixes.

[Scott T Smith]

If I recall correctly the name was the name of the local central office, and the first two or three digits were the same as the first three letters of the CO name.

[James Runchey]

We got married in 1953 and had a Mercury 9 phone number and we still have the same number, now dialed as 639 xxxx. I don't remember when they dropped the Mercury. Seems to me we might of started out with just 4 digits for a while, small town then.

[Jim Koepke]

We got married in 1953 and had a Mercury 9 phone number and we still have the same number, now dialed as 639 xxxx. I don't remember when they dropped the Mercury. Seems to me we might of started out with just 4 digits for a while, small town then.

In the early days each central office had its own designation. Mercury xxxx was a way for a caller to tell the operator across town in the Peoria central office how to route the call.

As an area grew there would be a Mercury 2, 3, 4 and so on.

jtk

[Jim Becker]

Yup...the phone number in the house I lived from birth through 1st grade had a phone number OR6-3538 with the OR standing for "Orleans". That would still be the exchange, but they were named back then. (Amazing I can remember that number being 57 years old! But not most of the subsequent numbers...)

[Bill Cunningham]

It's funny, I can't remember what my phone number was back then, probably because I never called myself (if I did I probably got a busy signal). But, my Grandmother was WA(lnut)5-4811, and my first girlfriend's was CH(erry)9-5204. Yup we had those name/number combinations in Canada too. When I moved into my current home 44years ago our ring was (two short) we have the same ring now to denote a long distance call coming in. Usually a
Telemarketer warning..

[Jim Becker]

Yea, the 'ring' you mention, Bill, is something I remember early on from when it was common for "party lines" to be provisioned in a neighborhood. Phones were very much a luxury at that point and the technology just couldn't support everyone having their own "line" cost effectively. We didn't keep the party line, however...it went private. My father was in insurance sales and the privacy was essential for business calls.

[Von Bickley]

Our phone number was:

ALpine 36949 = AL36949 = 2536949

another prefix was SunSet = SS = 77