Still “Off The Hook” - The Etymology Of Your Phone Number
An out-of-date version of this post from me can be found on the Board & Vellum archive from 2015.
Before I was 10 years old, a teacher asked me what kind of superpower I’d like to have. “I’d like to touch something and know where it comes from,” I said. Sort of like peering into a crystal ball. Come to find out during my college studies there was actually a name for that: psychometry - “the ability to discover facts about an event or person by touching inanimate objects associated with them”. Now, I was already drawn to the differences in things, like how not all movies were in color (why?!), or how car shapes were once like rockets with fins and such (so cool), a penny looked different in 1943 than it did in 1985 (but was still a penny), or how your parents’ “good” music just sounded… old. There was a difference in that aspect of relative “time” itself.
Growing up on TV shows like “Doctor Who” (who is a person travelling through time and space in his TARDIS (a blue police telephone box that acts like spaceship) or movies like “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure” (where they travel to the past and future in a 1980s phone booth with an umbrella’s wire skeleton on top) and “The Matrix” where landlines could help you traverse a digital reality (or rather, escape to reality). So I guess it’s no surprise that the phone itself became special to me, and having to remember your phone number if you got lost was one of the first things you learned as a kid.
While telephone booths have gone the way of the dinosaur (giving way to mobile devices that now control much of our lives), relics of their importance can still be found on street corners, signposts, and those big yellow paged books that you had to manually google to “reach out and touch someone”. In fact, the mobile provider “AT&T” still hides its lineage by being short for “American Telephone & Telegraph”! I’m getting ahead of myself, but rest assured it’s all connected. Even the origins of text messaging. How, you ask?
Well, let’s start with Alexander Graham Bell, who in 1876 patented the first telephone as an upgrade to the telegraph (which is basically the first text messaging machine - yep, texting came before voice calling, but “calling” actually used to mean dropping by in person to talk to someone… I digress). Being able to contact other people through a series of electrical lines had some rules. Point A and Point B had to be named in a way that differentiated them from other points. In fact the first telephone numbers weren’t actually numbers at all - they were names, either your personal name or the name of your company. Clearly that was going to get super confusing since many people had the same name, so in 1879 they began assigning numbers to each user registered with the service, creating numbers with up to four digits.
“Who ya gonna call?”
Well, the answer is that you only have one choice:
“The Operator”
You didn’t dial it either. In fact the dial hadn’t been invented yet, just the mouthpiece and receiver. You picked up the receiver and spoke into the mouthpiece to an “operator” on the other end that would connect you to who you were calling. What was happening was that there was an actual person (the operator) sitting in a room with a bunch of plugs and holes and they would take the plug that represented you and put it into the hole that represented who you wanted to call… assuming they were in the same city. This was the first telephone exchange, and it allowed a maximum of 9999 contacts.
Circa 1930s MobilGas advertising ashtray for one George Stock of Farina, Illinois (left)
What’s a telephone exchange? Basically all these small towns and districts had their own operators that sat in a room and connected calls 24 hours a day, seven days a week. (Not so different from the “call center” of today, I think.) Groups of operators in buildings exchanged numbers with other operators in other buildings farther away, so that your call could be transferred until they found the operator that had the plug of the person or business you wanted to talk to. In this way it might take several long pauses (and drops) before eventually you were connected across hundreds of miles of lines to reach your call’s destination.
In 1904, the rotary dial was invented. When it was installed on a telephone, it became “automatic”, i.e. without needing an operator to assist you. Users could input numbers themselves and bypass the operators, and this was fairly standard by the 1920s. It provided privacy if you didn’t want an operator to know who you were dialing (for clandestine liasons), and it also promised a faster connection to your party than waiting for operators to sort out the exchanges needed. What made it even easier was that the prefix codes weren’t just numbers, but names which corresponded to the area in which the number was based.
This worked fine for a while but as the network of electrical lines became larger and larger, suddenly there was a need for tens of thousands of unique identifiers. New homes in up-and-coming neighborhoods expected the same access that important businesses and city services received, namely their own lines of communication, rather than a caller going to the general store to use their phone, or, eventually, public telephones in the hotel lobby or train station, and eventually the telephone booth sitting by itself out on the street.
That’s when the service, then dubbed the American Bell Telephone Company (after its creator) came up with the “prefix”. What’s that? It’s what is now the first three digits of your seven digit phone number today, say “593” or something. That’s why there’s a hyphen or dash (-) after it, because it’s a prefix. The first prefixes were only two digits. If your number was 5857, it became 59-5857. At the time, only residents in large cities needed the prefix to account for population growth. The prefix originally identified what part of the city you lived in, according to the local telephone exchange.
Circa 1940s dial with 6-digit phone number (left), Circa 1950s dial with 7-digit phone number (right)
Still with me? Now say the year is 1953. You just bought your first house with a landline installed. Lucky you! The exchange designated your home number in Seattle as 2132, and say, since you live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, your prefix was the first two letters (CA) of “Capitol Hill”. Your direct phone number would be CA-2132, but you could easily say it out loud as “CApitol 2132”. That’s not a typo - when you see two letters capitalized in a telephone number, it’s because those were the two letters you dialed as your prefix. So, looking at the corresponding letters that numbers 1 through 9 represent, your direct number is also 22-2132.
The thinking was that mnemonics could help people remember increasingly long numbers without having to memorize a string of digits. “CApitol 2132” seemed much easier to regurgitate than “22-2132”, right? Well, for some people. It also provides us the example of a classic movie of the time, namely “BUtterfield 8” starring Elizabeth Taylor. Yep, the BUtterfield prefix not only identifies her location, but also social status, ethnicity… I mean a lot of assumptions were routinely made about someone based on their phone number in those days!
Later on, with more and more demand for individual phone lines, telephone exchanges began not just assigning neighborhoods as a prefix but also landmarks (RAinier), US Presidents (LIncoln and GArfield), famous people that first owned the land you were on, etc. until eventually in the 1940s they had to add a whole other number to the prefix. This resulted in our current era of the seven digit phone number. Telephone exchanges also began to adopt the nomenclature of “Baby Bells” according to their respective geographic regions (and as siblings of the Bell network): Pacific Bell for the west coast, Mountain Bell for the southwest, Bell South, Bell Atlantic, etc. They are the providers of the “yellow pages” for your respective location, sent to you when you initiated service.
In Seattle, the conversion between 6-digit numbers and 7-digit numbers happened in 1958, when the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Company provided a guide to what your existing telephone numbers were changing to. The individual four digit designator stayed the same, but your prefix might have changed… so be aware (or beware)!
When exchanges added the third prefix number, it didn’t change the two-digit usage of the mnemonic device (word), so normally you just added a number to the end. CApitol-2132 would just become CApitol 6-2132 or something like. An example from this era is the song “PEnnsylvania 6-5000” by Glenn Miller! Yep, it’s the phone number of the former Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City, shuttered in 2020 and being torn down for new development. Sigh.
Bauhaus Books & Coffee sign at 414 E Pine St, Seattle, 98122. Circa 2008 (demolished)
So, what about long distance codes? Same story. As the 7-digit numbers began to fill up, it was only a matter of time before we needed another way of designating how far away we were (oh, the irony). Put simply, we needed more digits. Now that the prefix was adopted everywhere and largely accepted, the area code became a set of three numbers within parentheses (___) to determine what national region you were a part of. Thus, the writing was on the wall for the extinction of “exchange numbers” that used words, because you were about to sandwich those words with more numbers. Slowly, printed material eliminated the use of words in depicting your number, and instead fully embraced that your number is just one in a hundred-thousand combinations that are equally hard to remember. So, CApitol 6-2132 became 226-2132, which became (206) 226-2132. As this was printed on your phone much of the time, it was accepted that this service is just what it is, a service, and that to use it you had to adapt. Didn’t matter if it was easy or hard. I mean, did you want to talk to your relatives, or not? Your choice.
Circa 1960s Fred E. Davis, Builder advertising ashtray from Moultonboro, New Hampshire (left)
Obviously there is a lot that happened in the 1980s with regards to the breakup of “Ma Bell” as a monopoly, which further eroded any sense of regionalism and (quaintly) your phone number explaining who you were. Many of us, I suspect, still own phone numbers with area codes that have no relation to where we actually put down roots and live today! If you’re curious though as to what your phone number might have been, check this archive. It’s only comprehensive as far as the Ma Bell network reached before 1984, but provides a good historical perspective!
And this brings me to my own example, namely that I’ve chosen to keep that era of telephone exchange numbers alive and well on the business cards I pass around. The front side gives you all the relevant and direct contact information you need in the format you are most accustomed to. The back, however (just like a coin?) assumes a bit more creativity. I’ve chosen to not only capture a bygone era of telephone exchanges by displaying the business number in anachronistic Ma Bell fashion, but also paired it with a future-forward QR code to service our digital age of direct advertising! I hope you find the combination amusing and, yes, useful.
We’re all a part of something greater, and continue to build upon ideas that came before. Experiences, labor, equity, opportunity. Nothing you do exists within a vacuum, which is why it’s so meaningful to not only recognize where we’re going, but just as importantly where we’re coming from. This brings me to the end of this particular thread and the namesake of the post: “Off The Hook”.
That phrase, according to Urban Dictionary can be “referring to something so fresh and new that it’s literally right off the [clothes] rack” - literally the hanger being the hook. Delving further, it can mean “exceeding the minimal standard of satisfaction” and before that “to express such demand or activity that it is beyond normal conditions”. And you know where that demand comes from, beyond normal conditions? It’s a phone ringing so much and so loudly (before you had volume controls) that it’s taken “off the hook” to shut it up. Boom. Thanks for visiting - you may hang up now.
