why did phone numbers in the 1950s have numbers and letters?

Question

In watching movies and tv shows from the 1950s and 60s, i notice people seemed to have phone numbers that consisted of letters and numbers- for example, on a 1960 Twilight Zone episode, someone had a phone number of 'trafalgar 1948'. What does that mean?
When did phone numbers drop the use of letters?

Answer 1

London, England, is most notable for using the first three letters, then the last four digits. New York, USA, was the first American location to use so-called "2-5 numbers" or 2L-5D, two letters and five digits. This became the North American standard as customer-dialled long distance service (Direct Distance Dialing) came into use through the 1950s.
As demand for phone service grew, the supply of assignable phone numbers began to dwindle, and several North American area codes were split to enable reuse of numbers. As the growth accelerated, the decision was made to switch to All-Number Calling (ANC), since there were several unpronounceable letter combinations that were not being used. This allowed more efficient use of the number supply; only two area code splits were necessary between 1962 and 1981. All-Number Calling was phased in slowly from 1958. Most areas had adopted it fully by the late 1960s, though it did not become universal until the 1980s.
The standard format for displaying telephone numbers that used exchange names was to capitalize the first few letters if they were dialed, e.g.,
MUrray Hill 5-9975 (one of the Ricardos' numbers on I Love Lucy - note that the H in Hill, although not dialed, is still capitalized)

Answer 2

1

Answer 3

When I first moved to the city I live in now I was 8 years old. That was in the 1960's. The first three numbers of the exchange were 878. Older people referred to it as TR8-xxxx. Younger people just said 878-xxxx. T references the 8 and R references the 7. T and R are not the first letters in the name of the city, county of anything else I could then or can now think of. When I asked back then, no one ever had a real answer.

Prior to that, I had spent some months living with my grandfather in a very rural area of W.Va. where they had "party lines". For those of you who don't know what a party line is, 3 or 4 families would be on the same phone line which worked sort of line a modern day home extension. Each family had their own number of rings to identify if they were being called. You could pick up the phone and listen to another person's conversation, although that was considered inappropriate. If you wanted to use the phone, you just picked it up to see if anyone else was on it. If they were, you hung up and tried later. If it was an emergency, you asked them, politely, to let you use the phone. Sometimes you would know the person on another line, sometimes not. Obviously, people didn't usually spend a long time on the phone back then!

Answer 4

Hi

I think there are two answers to your question, depending on the context.

Firstly, on your phone's keypad you will see that there are letters on some of the number keys. These are sometimes used to make phone numbers easier to remember - so "1-800-LIONS" would be dialed as 180054667. I guess you probably are already aware of this so apologies if I'm trying to teach my grandmother to suck eggs - however this practice isn't common outside north america and I don't know where you're from so...

Secondly, historically long-distance calls had to be placed through the operator, so while you might be able to dial a local 3 or 4 digit number from your telephone, calling to a different exchange required you to give the name of that exchange to the operator, followed by the number - so "Trafalgar 1948" is number 1948 on the Trafalger exchange. My very first telephone number was "Alstonefield 343".

The ability to dial long distance directly was introduced between the 50s and 70s in North America (where it is called Direct Distance Dialing) and in the UK (where it has the delightful acronym STD or Subscriber Trunk Dialing).

Answer 5

I don't see any of the answers that address the primary reason that the original phone numbers had letters. If I remember correctly, and revealing my age, originally there was no such thing as dialing the phone -- you picked up the phone, got the operator, and told her the number you wanted, and she would connect you. The numbers were divided into exchanges, and each exchange had a name, such as Essex or, in the question, Trafalgar. You would ask the operator for Trafalgar 3569, for example, and as there got to be more exchanges, it would be Trafalgar 8-3569. As the technology advanced, people started to be able to dial directly, using the first two letters of the exchange and the last five numbers. And eventually the exchanges were phased out, but the letters on the dial remained, and are now used primarily for clever numbers to dial.
But the reason there were at one time two letters was that they were short for the name of the exchange that you previously would have had to tell the operator before there was such a thing as direct dialing.

Answer 6

The word designated the area of the call. So that call would probably have been in the Trafalgar Square area, phone number 1948.

I'm not sure how it worked in the UK, but in the US they later (I think it was sometime in the 60s) abbreviated the location word to a three-letter code. But instead of using the letters they started using the corresponding numbers from the dial. So if Trafalgar was in the US it might have been abbreviated to TRF and then that phone number would have become 873-1948.

Answer 7

It wasn't just in the 1950s -- it was since the telephone was invented. It made it easier to remember numbers. The exchange (the first three numbers) was a geographical reference. In the 1960s, I lived in Minneapolis near Minnehaha Parkway. All the phones in the area had PS (for Parkway) as the disignator.

The old song Pennsylvania Six Five Thousand was the phone number for the Pensylvania Hotel in NYC.

Answer 8

In Britain, the first three letters were the code for an "exchange" that could handle 10,000 phone lines. This was a local purpose-built building or a large converted office. We lived in Glasgow, with the exchange code "DOUglas" because the building was in Douglas Street, about half a mile away. Of course the dial had 1 = ABC, 2 = DEF etcetera so it was just the same as dialling 268, but the Post Office thought the three-letter prefix would be easier for everybody to remember.

Answer 9

God bless Wikipedia:

Phone numbers were not usually strictly numeric until the 1950s. From the 1920s until then, most urban areas had "exchanges" of two letters, followed by numbers. In the UK, however, exchanges in the major cities were represented by three letters followed by four numbers; the letters usually represented the name of the exchange area (e.g. MAYfair, WATerloo), or something memorable about the locality (e.g. POPesgrove - an area where Alexander Pope once lived). This was considered easier to remember, although in London in the later part of this period it required the memorization of 7 characters (roughly the same number of characters as is usual for local calling in 2006). A word would represent the first two digits to be dialed, for example "TWinbrook" for "89" ; "BYwater" for "29"; 736-5000 was "PEnnsylvania - 6- 5 thousand". UK numbers had no letters at all except for those in the Director areas, where the first three of the seven digits were assigned letters, and written "ABBey 1234" or "WHItehall 1212", for example. A lack of pronounceable words, and the fact that most telephones world-wide have no letters on anyway, have led to the abandonment of letter usage in directory numbers except for publicity purposes.

Answer 10

The letters date back from earlier times when phone service was growing such that there needed to be several exchanges in the larger cities; each exchange was given a name. In New York, there were exchanges such as Pennsylvania and Murray Hill, which were abbreviated PEN and MUR. With continued growth, the last letter was changed to a digit (as PE6 and MU7), and additional digits were added as well. With the growth of direct distance dialing, the system became unwieldy: if you called New York 731-1234, should that show on your bill as a PEnnsylvania exchange, or something else? So the letter business was scrapped, but lingers on in such things as the title of the song "PEnnsylvania 6-5000".