An Interesting Look at the Telephone
If you have only been using the telephone for a limited number of years, you might be interested in reviewing a little bit of history about this device. Although it is not necessary for us to go the whole way back to the original telephone, just going back a couple of decades would be enough to fill an encyclopedia of knowledge.
It wasn’t all that long ago whenever a human operator sat at a large switchboard and manually connected different phone calls that were taking place. By plugging in a wire to wherever the phone call was being routed to, they have the power to connect and disconnect at will, the phone calls that were under their control. It was not very long, however, until the phone company began to see the need to automate the system a little bit further.
The 10 digit telephone system came into existence during this time, and it is one that we are still familiar with using today. The computers that are at the telephone company are able to use the various parts of this 10 digit number in order to route the calls effectively and without delay. By recognizing where the number is coming from and where it is going, it is not necessary to manually plug-in switches any longer.
The first three digits that you use whenever you are dialing a telephone number are routed to various areas of the country. Whenever the 10 digit system first came into place, these three digit numbers were assigned to specific areas, and therefore became known as area codes. At the time whenever they were first used, they seem to be in limitless supply but now they are being used up rather quickly.
After you dial the area code, you will next dial another three digits that will narrow down where your telephone call is going even further. Inside each area code, a combination of some 999 different numbers is available. These are typically assigned to a small area within a city or perhaps a town of medium or smaller size. These three numbers help the computers at the telephone company to route the call even faster.
Most of us are familiar with the pushbutton telephones that are currently being used but just a few short decades ago, the rotary phone was in existence. If you are unfamiliar with the rotary phone, it was a telephone with a large dial on the front which spun in a clockwise direction. You would put your finger in the hole that corresponded with the number that you were dialing and spin it to the right. As it would spin back, a number of clicks would be audible which would let the telephone company know which number you were dialing.
Now, we have cellular telephones and fax machines that are eating up an enormous amount of telephone numbers, along with using additional area codes from the available pool of numbers. Most of us could not imagine a day whenever we did not have the cellular phone, but it wasn’t all that long ago that nobody carried them around.
It is difficult to tell what the future is going to hold for us as far as the telephone and technology are concerned. For at least the foreseeable future, however, we will be using the 10 digit number and the area code in order to place our calls.