Telephone Exchange Names

A throwback to another era, telephone exchange names were commonly used in the largest cities from the Roaring Twenties until the Sixties.

Before the length of local numbers was standardised across the North American Numbering Plan, a call to a small village typically involved asking the operator for the name of the village, followed by the three or four digit local number – and the smallest places invariably had the live operators at the manual switchboards asking "Number, please?" in their stereotypical, scripted way. "Thank you."

Conversely, in a large, Atlanta or Toronto-sized city, one telephone central office was rarely able to cover more than a few local neighbourhoods. The copper to run wires from the subscriber's premesis to the telco was expensive to run, so distances were kept to a minimum; there were also practical limitations on how many numbers would fit on a single switchboard. City-wide metropolitan coverage would therefore require many individual local offices in the largest communities, which would typically be named after streets or neighbourhoods in some locally-distinctive manner. A Montréal number might (before the late 1950s) have looked something like "Atwater 1234" where "Atwater Avenue" is a major street in that city. When the dial telephone became commonplace, this was dialled as the first two (or in some places, the first three) letters of the exchange name, followed by the digits. "ATwater 1234" would therefore be dialled as AT-1234, a six-digit call.

The longest local numbers of this era were seven dial pulls, in a handful of large communities like London UK or New York City NY. For example, Gamages store in Holborn, London UK was assigned "☏HOLborn 8484" (which, were it still extant, would be +44 20 7-HOL-8484 in a more modern format) and a hotel near NYC's Penn Station was (and still is) PEN-5000 or "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" (+1-212-PE6-5000).

Direct-dial distance calling became commonplace in the late 1950s; all of the existing North American-style numbers were lengthened to a three-digit area code and a seven-digit local number, usually written as two letters and three numbers. AT&amp;T used a stock list of neutral but largely meaningless words as exchange names for small communities, so a number like 54x-xxxx would be written as LIx-xxxx with LI claimed to stand for "LIncoln" or "LIberty". These assignments were short-lived (typically 1958-1966 as their heyday) as eventually telcos just started printing the entire number as digits. KLamath 5-5555 therefore became 555-5555 (although assignments of 55X, 57X, 95X, 97X numbers were rare or non-existent as there weren't many names which could be spelled with those leading digits; 555 in particular contains almost nothing other than the 555-1212 directory information and a few fictional numbers).

There was some ambiguity as the letters O, Q and Z either had no consistent dial placement ("O" was on the zero in France, while "MNO" is on the 6 in North America) or were simply not used. Any attempt to use the original pattern ("ring me on LIberty 5-6789") would likely only cause confusion, as the letters on the telephone dials have been repurposed for other applications - such as vanity number "phonewords" where the caller dials the entire thing instead of just the first two letters (so L-I-B-E-R-T-Y as 542-3789, not 54x-xxxx with the last five digits indicated separately). Second-generation mobile "flip phones" or "feature phones" occasionally used the letters for SMS texting (so 6-MNO, 7-PQRS, 9-WXYZ, requiring the user keep pressing 7777 until the "S" appears, then wait a second, then compose the next character...) but even that is rapidly becoming obsolescent.

The old format does very much live on, however, in fiction. Often, a piece will attempt to invoke the 1950s or 1960s for nostalgia purposes, and suddenly they're calling on "KLamath 5-5555" as if it were a real telephone number – just to mimic the format which was Truth in Television in the monochrome Fifties era. These become a trope when the number of modern works invoking the format to appear to be set in the 1950s start to become more numerous than the surviving examples from that actual era.

Film

 * BUtterfield 8 (1935 John O'Hera novel) and its companion Elizabeth Taylor film (1960) take their name from a block of landline numbers (now +1-212-BU8-xxxx) which served upper-class neighborhoods om Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Magazines

 * MAD magazine is created in (and largely set in) New York City. As NYC numbers have always been seven digits (written as either 3L+4N or 2L+5N, depending on the era) a few businesses kept the old number format in their advertising well into the 1970's, long after the pattern was displaced by all-numbers in most other communities. Many old parodies from back issues (or MAD books which were based on those back issues) will have 1960s content with the old-style telephone numbers... usually played straight, without changing the exchange names to "RUbbish" or similarly-unflattering words.

Music

 * PEnnsylvania 6-5000 (Glenn Miller Orchestra) is named for the telephone number of New York's Pennsylvania Hotel (+1-212-PE6-5000). There were no telephone area codes in 1940, and this was the way numbers were written in that era.

Radio

 * Dragnet, a Police Procedural series based on old Los Angeles PD homicide investigation files, is Older Than Television and the radio series will contain (quite correctly) the various quirky telephone number formats of that era. On some of the old episodes, it's possible to hear a trunk call being manually handed off between multiple long distance operators only to connect a couple minutes later in some tiny hamlet where the manual exchange has three-digit local numbers. Los Angeles, as a fairly large city, would have had multiple named exchanges for various districts or neighbourhoods.

Television

 * MUrray Hill 5-9975 appears as the Ricardos' number on I Love Lucy. The Murray Hill exchange name refers to a specific neighbourhood in Manhattan NYC.