Automoderated users, Autopatrolled users, Bureaucrats, Comment administrators, Confirmed users, Forum administrators, Interface administrators, Moderators, Rollbackers, Administrators
116,199
edits
Telephone Exchange Names: Difference between revisions
replaced nonstandard name for COVID-19 with link to our page
m (→Music) |
Looney Toons (talk | contribs) (replaced nonstandard name for COVID-19 with link to our page) |
||
| (24 intermediate revisions by 6 users not shown) | |||
Line 1:
{{trope|wppage=Telephone exchange names}}
[[File:US-NJ-LAkewood2697-bell-system-telephone-number-rotary-dial-1940.jpg|thumb|400px|A rotary telephone dial ca. 1940 with its original number card.]]
A [[Forgotten Trope|throwback to another era]], '''telephone exchange names''' were commonly used in the largest cities from the Roaring Twenties until the Sixties. As an example, 736-5000 would have been written ''PEnnsylvania 6-5000'' or PE6-5000.
Line 9 ⟶ 8:
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 each subscriber's premises to the telco was expensive to deploy, 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 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
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 five 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
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
Exchange names lent themselves well to [[Phone Number Jingle]]s.
Line 21 ⟶ 20:
{{examples}}
== [[Advertising]] ==
[[Image:Delta-chicagotrib1950ad.png|thumb|A vintage 1950 Chicago Tribune local ad]]
* [http://www.fuzzymemories.tv/index.php?c=2014&m=hudson This TV commercial for Boushelle Upholstery Cleaning] in Chicago ran in 1978, but still uses their old exchange name as part of a [[Phone Number Jingle]]: "HUdson 3-2700!"▼
* As the referenced era predates the first InWATS +1-800 numbers (1966-67), this numbering pattern appears only in local ads which relied on local numbers. Old newspapers (as local media) are filled with examples, but national campaigns often displayed no telephone number in this era.
▲* [https://web.archive.org/web/20150910164713/http://www.fuzzymemories.tv/index.php?c=2014&m=hudson This TV commercial for Boushelle Upholstery Cleaning] in Chicago ran in 1978, but still uses their old exchange name as part of a [[Phone Number Jingle]]: "HUdson 3-2700!"
== [[Film]] ==
* ''[[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 on Manhattan's Upper East Side.
* ''[[Back to the Future (film)|Back to the Future]]'' displays numbers in the KL5-5555 format in
* The 1985 comedy-horror film ''[[Transylvania 6-5000]]'' is titled with a shout-out to the song "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" (see below).
* The 1948 [[Film Noir]] movie ''[[Call Northside 777]]'' (starring [[Jimmy Stewart]]) uses an exchange name in its title.
* Rose's telephone number in the 1962 version of ''[[The Manchurian Candidate (1962 film)|The Manchurian Candidate]]'' starts with "Eldorado-5".
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
* "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.
* One of ''[[Hee Haw]]''{{'}}s long-running sketches featured Junior Samples selling used clunkers at "Samples Motors", which you could always reach at the phone number "BR-549".
* ''[[Murdoch Mysteries]]'', set in late nineteenth-century Toronto, pre-dates the rotary dial era. It mentions a few manual exchanges, named mostly for local neighbourhoods like Temperance Street or the Toronto Junction. An exchange name (such as "Temperance") was followed by a four-digit local number (one of the numbers was 1098). The manual operator could overhear all calls, a plot point as any eavesdropping would be controversial but might aid the investigations. <!-- I do not know if any of those telephone numbers are still (or ever were) in use. -->
== [[Magazines]] ==
* ''[[
== [[Music]] ==
* "
** 2600 Magazine had claimed this is the oldest telephone number still in use.
** At one point, the hotel's phone system was configured to provide a list of options while a portion of the historic Glenn Miller tune played in the background.
** The hotel opened in 1919 and ceased operation on 1 April 2020, at the height of the [[COVID-19 pandemic]]. Vornado demolished the building to make way for yet another non-descript office building (so much for NY history). The number has been kept in service by moving it to an Internet telephone company - where it just returns a message that the hotel is permanently closed.
* At least three other songs that hit the charts used this device for their naming:
** "BEechwood 4-5789" by The Marvelettes (1962)
Line 56 ⟶ 54:
{{quote|''Los Angeles, give me Norfolk Virginia,
''Tidewater four ten oh nine''}}
== [[Radio]] ==
* ''[[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.
Line 82 ⟶ 66:
''They took away our Plaza, our Yukon, our Michigan,
''And left us with 47329768...}}
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* ''Transylvania 6-5000'' (1963) is a [[Looney Tunes|Merrie Melodies]] animated short starring [[Bugs Bunny]]. Like many other examples on this page, it was named for the Glenn Miller tune ''
* In the episode "Mr. Plow" of ''[[The Simpsons (
== [[Real Life]] ==
* A Toronto restaurant was named the ''Grover Exchange'' (or, later, the "Grover Pub and Grub") as its building originally housed telephone central offices for six-digit numbers
{{reflist}}
▲[[Category:{{BASEPAGENAME}}]]
[[Category:Pages Original to All The Tropes]]
[[Category:Phone Tropes]]
| |||