The Past Several Decades of Telephone History
Depending on the amount of time that you have been using the telephone, you might be fascinated to learn a little bit of history about it. I’m not necessarily talking about going all the way back to Alexander Graham Bell but I am referring to the fact that the telephone has really changed quite a bit in recent history.
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 of the telephone number were handed out to different areas of the country and they became known as the area code. This is still true, even today. By looking at an area code, you will be able to tell a general area of where the telephone call came from. Although these area codes are being used up rather quickly, there are still plenty of them left and it should work well into the foreseeable future.
The second three digits in the telephone number are more of a localized number which can help you to break down where a telephone call is coming from or going to. Inside each area code, the possibility of 999 different numerical combinations allowed for a wide diversity and a narrow coverage for each of those numbers.
It wasn’t all that long ago whenever we didn’t use pushbutton telephones, and everybody had a rotary dial phone. Although these went out of service a couple of decades ago, most of the telephone systems to allow you to use a rotary system, even today. It was a large dial with numbers and you would spin the dial and allow it to spin back, the noise of the spinning letting the phone company know which number it was that you dialed.
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 would be nice to be able to peer into the future and see what the technological advances are going to bring to us. Until that time, however, the simple 10 digit number is all that is necessary for us to talk to anybody, at any place in the country.