In the early days of direct dialing, as 7-digit telephone numbers were adopted, Ma Bell decided people would never get used to remembering or dialing such a long string of numbers.
The solution was adopt exchange names for the first two digits; indeed, telephone exchanges were actual physical structures and they were generally referred to by that name. Even now, when the building (probably) houses an all-electronic digital switch instead of banks of electromechanical relays and crossbars, is not limited to a single pair of leading digits in the numbers it serves and may serve ten times as many subscribers, telephone company employees tend to call the locations the old prefix-names.
I knew a few -- Broad Ripple's exchange is CLifford and in WW II, Homeplace/Carmel numbers were VIctory, though I don't know if the exchange on 106th St. had been built at that time. I figured any master list(s) from the telephone companies were long gone.
"Long gone" is not so gone as you might think -- here's the 1955 list of Official Exchange names from AT&T! The Web's enabling of of information packrattery never ceases to amaze me.
UPDATE: Old Grouch points out the use of exchange names-as-numbers dates back at least to six-digit telephone numbers. See Comments
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Mine was DIamond.
ReplyDeleteDIamond 3-9519. And it was a "party line". We shared it with a neighbor or two.
TIffany 6-5868
ReplyDeleteOut here on the Left Coast there is a chain of pretty good family restaurants called The Black Bear Diner. (And for me to speak approvingly of an outfit from California... Mt. Shasta area, actually.)
Anyway, they opened one in Mrs. Drang's hometown, so we checked it out. Good food, usually enough in a meal for leftovers for lunch the next day. The menu is on newsprint, and features items from old editions of the local bird cage liner. Mrs. Drang was having fun saying "Hey, I went to school with her!" and "I remember that!" One of the items was about the adoption of the new, standardized telephone exchange system nationwide, and how the names of the exchanges were adopted with an eye to being familiar to folks all over the country, "Which is why there are no exchanges called 'Rainier' or 'Cascade.'"
When I was a kid ours was Amherst 61654 and it was a party line. Ingersoll and Hunter were quite common here in SLC also.
ReplyDeleteThe earlier 6-digit exchanges in the Broad Ripple area were BRoadway and GLendale. At the switchover, BR numbers became CL5, and GL ones became CL3. WAbash became WAlnut, don't recall what MElrose (636) was before the switch.
ReplyDeleteThen you can always go back a few more years, when Indianpolis had TWO telephone companies...
(I also recall how primitive it seemed in the mid 60s when you couldn't direct-dial into Bloomington or Terre Haute because General Telephone was still using 5-digit numbers!)
Interesting. I don't know what the numbers here were back then (it's a little before my time), but the older current prefixes here in Blacksburg, VA were mostly reserved for radiotelephones (552, 951, 953). The other two (230, 231) are for Virginia Tech only. 961 is the only town prefix that was a regular number back then.
ReplyDeleteHey! Our old Toronto exchange was CLifford as well. I'll never forget our phone number, CL1-4538. Wonder why?
ReplyDeleteThe face of telephony has changed so much in just my short lifetime; I found it amusing that when The X-Files wanted to do a "retro" episode, all they had to do was give Agent Mulder a "brick" cell phone to evoke that late '80s mood...
ReplyDeleteWhen I moved to Atlanta in the mid-'70s, the 404 area code was the largest toll-free dialing area in the US. By the time I left in '00, it had become the first city in the US with 10-digit local dialing.
SAratoga 3-4016 back in Joliet, Illinois.
ReplyDeleteThere were old analog switches still in use in rural areas up to the 1980s. Pioneer Telephone (later merged into Sprint) used an old rotary/analog switch in Medicine Lodge, Kansas until it was replaced in 1986. Central Telephone also had some old analog switches in place in central Missouri until that same period. I worked closely with the local exchanges when installing computer equipment and modems (pre-internet era.)
ReplyDeleteThe create a link thing only works for blogger.
ReplyDeletehttp://williamthecoroner.wordpress.com/2009/11/20/whats-your-exchange/
Current dialing rules for landlines bug the hell out of me. Cell phone is easy - it's 10-digit dialing pretty much no matter what (I suppose if 7-digit dialing is allowed int eh area code you can use it, but I've honestly never tried).
ReplyDeleteBut I can never keep straight when I need to use 7-digit, 10-digit, or 11-digit dialing on a landline. (OK, that's not entirely true - since I live in NJ 10-digit dialing will work everywhere within state; and most places 7-digit dialing will *not*).
William: Aha. You mean this link!
ReplyDeleteYou can do it by spelling out the HTML -- (left caret)a(space)href=put-the-URL-here-http://-and-all(right caret)words you want to be the link(left caret)/a(right caret), carets being the French quote-y things you get on a shifted , or . but it's a lot of work.
Roberta- found your site via Tam. Love some of this stuff. Grew up with the phone # OLympic 2-1505 in Oakland. Didn't see the HIgate exchange listed for our area, but I do remember that they had HIgate 4-4444 for Yellow Cab, and they pushed the 7-digit use in those days. I guess they figured the drunks could always call a cab if they remembered to just hook their fingers in the 4-hole of the dial (are we givin' away our ages that we can actually remember a rotary dial?) and keep spinnin' 'til a dispatcher answered.
ReplyDeleteJust a few months ago I donated a couple of typewriters (Smith-Corona and an Underwood) to a local thrift store. Figured the cost of shipping them to the East Coast would've been too high for you to be interested. I'm pretty sure I could liberate 'em for a nominal cost (like maybe free) if you'd be interested in either/both.
You can contact me at inbredredneck-at-saber-dot-net and I'll see if I can get a shipping rate. Don't know if either'd fit in a large Priority Mail Flat Rate box, which'd make it $13.95.
I sent a link to your site to a friend who was a USAF radioman on C-47/C-119/C130 about 50 years or so ago. Thought he might get a kick out of somebody who can still use a key.
Again, like the site and will keep droppin' in occasionally.
Rob J
We had Walnut and Parkway among many others where I grew up. In the basement of the neighborhood exhange building lay many wet cell batteries ..... wonder where they all went ?
ReplyDeleteNoel
When I was a kid in Michigan's upper peninsula back in the 1960's our telephones were still connected manually by an operator. Your phone number was the letter/number combination that told her where in the switchbox grid to plug the wires in.
ReplyDeleteOur number was 59-W.
Changing the subject from phones to ham radio, have you tried fldigi (see http://www.w1hkj.com/) yet? The audio output of the receiver gets plugged into the PC and then fldigi makes sense of what it's hearing. (Not that you *need* YAD - Yet Another Distraction.)
ReplyDeleteFLeetwood 40486. Springfield, VA
ReplyDeleteWell, Ed, I would need to have a computer in my ham shack and it would have to be connected to a receiver. And, see, it's usually 1937 down there; sometimes it's 1957 but I don't have room for a Sperry-Rand Univac. :)
ReplyDeleteI was think of that Eee PC you mentioned elsewhere but, yeah, the sight of all that vintage gear would frighten the PC so badly it probably wouldn't even read its boot record.
ReplyDeleteAh, 1957 and the sweetly acrid smell of old solder, 1 and 2 watt resistors, 7 and 9 pin tubes with the occasional octal rectifier or 6L6 power pentode and dozens of uFd capacitors charged to 250 volts. (Where's my screwdriver with the arc-blackened tip?)
Years ago I refurbished a BC-348Q receiver and used it in the shack for a while. It's a sealed steel box for use in military aircraft with a bunch of vacuum tubes. Not a very good receiver but a fabulous heater. Couldn't afford the tubes today, and probably would have a hard time finding the components, too. Memories.
My exchange growing up in Philadelphia was "Pioneer". PI4-5953. Other exchanges that I remember were Locust (LO: center city) and Cumberland (CU: greater Northeast). Also, one could dial the weather for a weather report: WE7-1212, and even get a reading of the night sky activity from the Franklin Institute's "dial a satellite" LO3-1363.
ReplyDeleteI remember walking to the telephone company to pay the telephone bill every month when the weather was nice. Just like the banks, the floors and counters were marble, with high ceilings and columns. It made one feel like using the telephone was the most glorious of activities. And it was.