Telephone Exchange Names: Difference between revisions

Conversely, in a large, dense 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 theeach subscriber's premises to the telco was expensive to rundeploy, 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 "AtwaterATwater 1234" where "Atwater Avenue" is a major street in that city. When the dial telephone became commonplace, this was dialed 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 dialed 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 NYNYC. 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 the Hotel Pennsylvania near NYC's Penn Station was (and still is) PEN-5000 or "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" (+1-212-PE6-5000). The names were often distinctive and tied to local geography, so Chicago numbers prefixed with "WRIgley" were likely in a neighbourhood near Wrigley Field... as a general, ball park estimate. They were a local phenomenon, they were an exclusively big-city phenomenon but a few were iconic in their respective communities.

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 threefive numbers (2L+5N). AT&T used a stock list of neutral but largely meaningless words as exchange names for small communities,<ref>While the Bell System tried to avoid actual place names on the generic AT&T list, occasionally one would slip past and get assigned in a way which doesn't fit local geography. There's a Liberty Village neighbourhood in Toronto (416) and a Wellington village in Prince Edward County (613), but those respective area codes assigned the "LIberty" and "WEllington" prefixes to Hamilton and Cornwall.</ref> 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[[The Fifties|1950s]] to [[The Sixties|mid-1966sixties]] as their heyday) as eventually telcos just started printing the entire number as digits. [[555|KLamath 5-5555]] therefore became KL5-5555555 and ultimately 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 today, as the letters on the telephone dials have been largely 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). Second-generation mobile "flip phones" or "feature phones" occasionally used the letters on the dialpad 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...); that became obsolete with smart phones and touch screens. The original scheme is merely [[Forgotten Trope|a long-forgotten historical footnote.]]

The old format does very much live on, however, in fiction. Often, a piece will [[Period Piece|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. And of course, they remain, accidental fossils, in [[Unintentional Period Piece]]s that never anticipated they'd ever disappear.

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

* ''[[Back to the Future (film)|Back to the Future]]'' displays numbers in the KL5-5555 format in 19581955, then reverts to the more recent 555-5555 format in 1985. (It also predicts fax machines will be [[irony|one of the futuristic technologies of 2015]].)

* ''[[MADMad]] magazine'' was created in (and largely set in) New York City. As NYC numbers had 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 and signage well into the 1970s, 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.

* ''PEnnsylvania"Pennsylvania 6-5000''" (Glenn Miller Orchestra) is named for the telephone number of New York's Pennsylvania Hotel (+1-212-PE6-5000). ThereLikely werethe no[[Trope telephoneCodifier]], areaor codesat inleast 1940,the andmost thisfamous wasexample, even though the wayofficial numberstitle weredoes writtennot incapitalize thatthe eraE.

* ''[[Dragnet]]'', a 1949 [[Police Procedural]] series based on old Los Angeles PD homicide investigation files, is almost [[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.

* ''[[Whitehall 1212]]'' (a US radio show from 1951-52) was named for the once-famous telephone number of Scotland Yard (introduced in 1934 and used until the 1960s). WHI-1212 (944-1212) has since been replaced by New Scotland Yard on +44 20 7230-1212 (which is not the same number) or (locally within London) the Metropolitan Police 101 non-emergency or 999 distress numbers to reach the Metropolitan Police.