The Area Code is younger than John McCain.
OK, this is a good one - so good, in fact, that it gets its very own category (”Area Codes”).
While the telephone itself was invented a mere 60 years prior to Pa McCain looking at John and saying to Ma McCain “Someday this boy will grow up to not become President!, the area code wasn’t introduced until the 1940’s.
I find this fact very confusing because, according to census.gov, the population of the United States in 1940 was 132,122,446. Does this mean that less than 10% of the people had phone numbers because, without an area code, the highest number could only be 999-9999?
I’d ask John McCain for clarification but I tend to think that he wouldn’t take my call.
(Thanks Jonathan K.)
Thursday, May 15, 2008
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Nice site. Funny and thought-provoking. I’ve thus far kept those ‘annoying Google ads’ off mine as well. I’ll be checking back in the coming weeks, and funneling some folks your way!
Comment by Brent Simon — May 15, 2008 @ 9:06 pm
love to hear it… thanks!
Comment by admin — May 15, 2008 @ 9:20 pm
Lookup the North American Numbering Plan, NANP for short, on wikipedia. Has the full history of the area codes there.
Comment by TheJew — May 15, 2008 @ 10:37 pm
Ok, this one got me. Products and processed foods and other people, sure, whatever. But the area code. I would not have guessed that.
Comment by Bridgett — May 16, 2008 @ 12:29 am
Well, I think the way people made calls was to hit the zero and say “long distance operator” and then she (usually) would come on and say (add nasal voice) “What city please?” and then you would say, New Orleans and then she’d say “Connecting, wait just a moment, please” and she would patch the cables (literally, with stereo style cables and plugs, one plug board to another to physically route the call to the next hub) and then you’d get the new orleans operator and she would connect your now localized call to your party. My mom is older than John Mccain, but she worked around 1950 as a telephone operator doing the kinds of things I just paraphrased for you. THAT’s why there were no area codes. You didn’t need area codes until there were automatic mechanical switches and fewer humans in the system.
Comment by Emmi — May 16, 2008 @ 2:38 am
We had telephone #’s that started with “Slocum 6 or Pennsylvania 6 so they were able to use the numbers over again but with a different callname.
Comment by Claudia — May 16, 2008 @ 10:01 am
I would think that not every person would need a phone number, just the household.
Even then, it’s still likely that there weren’t many households with phones before the advent of the area code…
Comment by Shadowbird — May 16, 2008 @ 2:42 pm
I believe that so-called “party lines” were pretty common as well. One area of houses all shared one phone number, the phone rang in all the houses at once, etc. My dad (younger than McCain) used to tell me about that.
Hell, my wife (late 20’s) grew up on a farm in NE Kansas and has some fuzzy memories about that.
Comment by mog — May 16, 2008 @ 2:45 pm
So is the Zip Code (even in it’s early forms). 1- or 2-digit postal zones for big cities were introduced in 1943, 5-digit zips in 1963 (made mandatory in 1967), and the current zip + 4 in 1983.
Comment by Kate — May 16, 2008 @ 3:06 pm
OK, there are more than 9,999,999 numbers that fit into seven digits. The numbers don’t just increase in order! You could actually have 9^7 (4,782,969) possible numbers (a few less discounting ones that start with 0, 555, etc.)
Comment by Max — May 16, 2008 @ 4:57 pm
There are more than 9,999,999 numbers that fit into seven digits.. you forgot to count 0000000 as a number when counting incrementally, so the total number is 10,000,000.
I think you have overlooked a few things in your calculations.. the first of which being that 4,782,969 is less than 10 million. Also, there are 10 possible digits (don’t forget zero!), so you want to start with 10^7.
Since the first digit can’t be 0 or 1, to prevent confusion to the old switching system, our new total is (10-2)*10^6, or 8000000. Subtract the 10000 numbers that start with ‘555′ and you have a maximum of 7,990,000 available numbers in each area code.
I remember there used to me more restrictions on prefixes so they didn’t look like area codes, but I think they have been removed since 10-digit dialing is now pretty standard. My cell phone prefix is 413, actually.
Any ideas on how many numbers we have when we include area codes?
Comment by Shea — May 16, 2008 @ 5:13 pm
Shea,
I think my head just exploded….
Thanks for writing!
Comment by admin — May 16, 2008 @ 5:15 pm
I made my first phone call back in 1947 under the guidance of my grandmother, who was busy in the next room. I wanted to call Aunt Oppie, who lived just a few houses down the street in Glen Cove, NY (30 miles from Manhattan). A sweet female voice enquired, “Number, please?”. I answered, “512″. She said, “The line is busy”. The only lion I knew about was the one at the zoo and I started to wonder what it was doing. Granny came into the room, spoke with the operator, hung up and explained it to me. When they introduced dial telephones and area codes, all area codes had a “0″ or “1″ as the middle digit so that the telphone equipment could tell whether a local number without the area code or a long distance number was being dialed.
Comment by Francis Edmonds — May 16, 2008 @ 6:57 pm
The vast majority of people did not have telephones in 1940.
Comment by arbitrista — May 16, 2008 @ 7:08 pm
I am 68 years old, almost 4 years younger than McSame, and I can tell you that you are wrong about the area codes. As a small child, I remember telephones where you only called through an operator. Even when dial phones were normal, there WERE NO AREA CODES. Ours was 499-6398. In the 50’s, it changed to (i.e.) SP499-6398. As mentioned in another answer, when you wanted to make a long distance call, you dialed 0 and told the operator the number and what city and state, and she (usually) plugged it in physically.
Area codes did not exist until I was at least in my teens. I understand you are trying to point out his age, and I don’t disagree, but get your facts straight.
Others have said, and I can verify that not every family had a telephone in the late 30’s and early 40’s, and those that did only had one phone per family, not like now.
Still, carry on, you are making a good point.
Comment by Linda — May 16, 2008 @ 7:57 pm
Maybe Pop McCain foned Mom McCain his weird prediction on that exact fone. Spooky.
Comment by Jesus the lizard — May 16, 2008 @ 9:16 pm
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Pingback by test » Blog Archive » The Area Code. — May 17, 2008 @ 9:11 am
This is a good site, but you forgot that there are a shitload of possible number combos with seven digits–much more than 9,999,999, which is just the highest number possible. You could have figured this out with a scientific calculator, which is much younger than John McCain. He would have used a slide rule.
Comment by Avram — May 17, 2008 @ 8:44 pm
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Pingback by Drasties - Nou breekt me de klomp. — May 17, 2008 @ 9:43 pm
In the 50’s there were two types of local exchanges. In one, an operator answered a light on her board when you picked up your phone, and said “Number please”. You’d then tell her (always a woman) the local number or you would ask her for the Long Distance operator.
The other system was dial (rotary). You’d be able to dial within about 30 or 40 miles by dialing a unique - for that area- seven digit number. Dial “211″ for long distance.
We had a precurser to area codes, though. I lived in Northern NJ, and we could dial “11″ plus a New York City number and be connected without an operator. In New York City they could also dial “11″ and a New Jersey number to reach us. This was as early as 1951.
Comment by remny — May 17, 2008 @ 10:21 pm
People pointing out the total number of combinations here are missing the fact that phone number prefixes, like zip codes, were assigned regionally. So, for instance, if prefix 123-xxxx were assigned to New York City, and 456-xxxx were assigned to rural Montana, that New York prefix would run out of combinations much faster than that Montana prefix. Adding area codes allowed NYC, Montana, etc. to all use all possible combinations of prefixes.
As someone else pointed out, those prefixes were also limited by the fact that only area codes could have a 0 or 1 as their second digit (the switching systems looked at the second digit and if it wasn’t a 0 or 1 you would get connected right after you finished dialing the 7th digit). Plus neither prefixes nor area codes could start with 0 or 1.
The introduction of 1+ dialing allowed the use of 0 or 1 as the second digits of prefixes, as well as 2-9 as the second digit of area codes. (The switching system now looks for a 1 followed by 2-9 to tell that you’re dialing an area code.)
Oh, and we can’t forget other special reserved numbers that reduced the possible number of prefixes everywhere, like the x11 numbers, plus 555-xxxx. I’m not sure, but they may have reserved x00, as well, even before area codes.
Comment by Lun Esex — May 18, 2008 @ 3:34 pm
Well, I knew this one, because I’m younger than John McCain, and I remember when area codes started. Before that, you needed a long-distance operator to connect you outside your local phone company’s “book.”
I also remember when ZIP codes started.
I just found your (great) blog, so I don’t know if you’ve covered ZIP codes yet.
Comment by Cal Gal — May 19, 2008 @ 1:24 pm
Apparently boys and men were the first to be switch operators but they tended to swear and were not polite or reliable so companies switched to hiring women early on, one of the early employment oppertunities for women. The boys were sent to the late shifts and basically replaced. Of course both phones and operators are older than McCain.
Comment by Chris Candell — May 20, 2008 @ 3:11 pm
Not just area codes - phone numbers didn’t even use seven numbers when McCain was born!
At that time the US used a 2L-5N system - two letters and five numbers. The most famous of them is perhaps the old Glen Miller song, which references PEnnsylvania 6-5000.
In New York, it wasn’t until 1965 that 7 numbers were used in assigning new phone numbers. This was pretty similar around the country.
Comment by Shield — May 21, 2008 @ 9:21 am
I was talking to my grandma and mom last weekend, and when my mom was a kid on a rural WI farm in the 1960’s, they had a neighborhood line. Families within several miles shared the same phone line. Even though area codes existed in the 1960’s, this could be why there were no area codes previously. Not sure though?
Comment by Emily J — May 21, 2008 @ 12:31 pm
Emily J, I’m old enough to remember party lines. The deal was that you had one line shared by three or four people, but you had four phone numbers. Each phone number was set up at the central office switch to cause a different ring pattern on that one actual physical piece of copper. Thus 432-3243 might go “ring….ring…ring” and 432-3244 might go “ringring….ringring…ringring” and so forth. You had to answer only your ring pattern, and if you picked up when someone else was talking you could hear their conversation. For the most part because long distance phone calls were so expensive back then (over $1.50 a minute, or roughly $15 a minute in today’s dollars!), party lines tended to not be very busy, since they were in rural areas where there were few other people to call. People wrote letters instead. The telephone was for emergencies, not something you used daily.
I still don’t recall how you called one of the other people on the party line. Probably because we never did — we just walked down the road to Aunt Rachel’s house or whatever, and knocked on the door if we wanted to talk to her.
- Badtux the not-as-elderly-as-McSame Penguin
Comment by Badtux — May 21, 2008 @ 2:11 pm
Seven digit telephone numbers were for big city slickers. There was no need for them outside of places like New York City. New York City introduced the seven digit phone number in 1930. ( PEnnsylvania 6 - 5000 instead of PEnnsylvania - 5000 ) So Mr. Mc Cain was born 6 years after the very limited introduction of seven digit dialing.
And years before they began to think about things like direct dialed long distance.
We didn’t get dial phones out here in the woods until the early 60s. Since a real live person was connecting all the calls, the number didn’t have to have a strict amount of digits. The local dairy’s telephone number was “4″. The grocer was “127″ People on party lines had things llke 3L22, which I have been told, in English, is “Party line 3, two longs” Everybody on party line “three” had a ring pattern. If it rang once “short” it was for the first subscriber, if it rang once “long” it was for the second subscriber, one short and one long for the third subscriber. Ten party lines - the kind where ten households shared one telephone line - had more complex patterns.
Comment by Adirondacker — May 24, 2008 @ 4:59 am
Party line telephone sets could also be wired so that only some (usually half) of them would ring at a time and the central office could apply ring signal to select which half would ring. This ment two parties on the same party line could have the same ring pattern.
There were several ways to talk to someone on the same party line. One way was you would call the operator and request the phone on the same line and hang up. The operator would then ring the other party and you would pick up again after a delay. This is similar to how some 3-way calling plan work now with one person placing the call on hold, calling another phone, then reconnecting the call on hold.
Comment by lynn — June 8, 2008 @ 5:02 pm
I always wondered how things worked before area codes. LOL…it makes sense though…human operators plugging in cables, before they figured out how to automate the process.
Comment by area code — June 16, 2008 @ 6:02 pm
really nice to read the area code. you have chosen the perfect picture accordingly. keep it up.
Comment by Sara — July 21, 2008 @ 8:56 am