Birth Of Phone Digits

Several years passed. Telephone users and sets sprouted like mushrooms. City telephone networks came into being and every phone set was assigned a number. Calling a subscriber would require giving his or her number to the hello girl.

In 1910 the USA, then a country with the highest telephone penetration rate, numbered over 7 million subscribers, which compared to Russia’s 155,000. In the days of old an ordinary telephone number had four digits, while large cities used five-digit numbers. To reach a person beyond city bounds by phone, you would normally have to tell the operator the name of the city and a number. A telephone call used to be pre-ordered, which took some waiting.

In the 1910s automatic telephone switches started to supersede hello girls who made connections manually. By the beginning of the First World War the USA had over 100 automatic telephone switches, Germany—7, Great Britain—2. Moscow saw the first automatic telephone switch installed not sooner than in 1924, and that one was in the Kremlin. The city automatic telephone switch started operation in 1930.

Americans who were to encounter the problem of 7-digit numbers sooner that any other nation, found a mnemonic solution to the problem (it was generally believed back then that 7-digit numbers were hard to memorize): the first three digits were replaced with letters some word started with. For technical reasons no telephone number in the US started with 1. For historical reasons zero was always used to call the operator. As a result, any American telephone number could start with any figure but 1 and 0.

Mnemonic rules were in use in London and Paris until mid-1960s. At first Americans adopted the LLL-NNNN format (three letters, four numerals). After becoming aware that it was running out of words beginning with the needed three letters, New York introduced the LLN-NNNN format in 1930 with all the other cities following suit in 1947–48.

Source : www.artlebedev.com/mandership/91/

The First Hello

Edison invented a lot of things, for sure, but one thing he didn't invent was the telephone. The brass ring for that one goes to Alexander Graham Bell, although Elisha Gray filed his patent for a similar device the same day. Edison's contribution to the "improvement in telegraphy" was giving us the salutation now used the world over, in one form or another. Bell's famous first words spoken over what we now call the telephone -- "Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you." -- were delivered without any greeting at all.

When he did weigh in on the subject, Bell proposed using "ahoy, ahoy," the age-old seafarer's hail. And, in fact, ahoy was the first greeting used, until Edison suggested hello.At the time, the phone was conceived of as a business machine that would connect two offices with a permanently open line. Some people toyed with the idea of an alarm bell at each end to alert one office that the other office wanted to speak.

Contrary to some accounts, Edison did not coin the word. Halloo and variants had been used for ages to urge on hunting hounds and to shout to people at a distance. Edison was tinkering with a prototype phonograph in 1877 and used a shouted halloo! for testing. Early gramophones and telephones alike had pretty low signal-to-noise ratios.

Hello itself turns up in a number of places prior to 1877, including Mark Twain's travelogue, Roughing It, published four years before Bell called Mr. Watson. Earlier references to the word also exist, one dating back to at least 1826.

Source : www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/08/dayintech_0815