Telephone Exchange Names

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A 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.

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&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 KL5-555 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...) but even that is rapidly becoming obsolescent. The original scheme is merely a long-forgotten historical footnote.

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.

Examples of Telephone Exchange Names include:

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.
• Back to the Future displays numbers in the KL5-5555 format in 1958, then reverts to the more recent 555-5555 format in 1985. (It also predicts fax machines will be one of the futuristic technologies of 2015.)

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.

Magazines

• MAD magazine is 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 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.
• Allan Sherman's Let's All Call Up A.T & T And Protest To The President March (1963) lamented the demise of the named exchanges (It's "The Let's All Call Up AT And T And Protest To The President March" / Can you see him smirking and smiling? / 'Cause he's got us all digit dialling…) with "Where are the days of Auld Lang Syne? / Butterfield 8! Madison 9! / Let's keep those beautiful names alive."

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.
• 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 101 non-emergency or 999 distress numbers to reach the Metropolitan Police.