Telephone Exchange Names: Difference between revisions
a small city might've only had 4- or 5- digit numbers, so the bulk of the history (pre-1950s) applies to the largest cities
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(a small city might've only had 4- or 5- digit numbers, so the bulk of the history (pre-1950s) applies to the largest cities) |
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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 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) 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, for example 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
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, 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. [[555|KLamath 5-5555]] therefore became KL5-5555 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).
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