Why the capital U?
In the title?
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"You beat death, Arvin, but you couldn't beat me."
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MovieChat Forums > BUtterfield 8 (1960) Discussion > Why the capital U?
There's another thread on exactly the same topic which must be recent enough that imdb hasn't deleted it.
It's a telephone exchange: as in BU8-1234 (or, in the more modern version, 289-1234). That was a common way to write them - if you look in an old copy of the yellow pages, you'll see lots of ads with the phone number written like:
BUtterfield 8 - 1234
GLencourt 4 - 1234
PEnnsylvania 6 - 5000.
The recent thread is, indeed (at the moment), a mere four slots beneath this one. The subject is "Question" which, admittedly, is a bit all-purpose.
shareBUtterfield 8 - 1234
GLencourt 4 - 1234
PEnnsylvania 6 - 5000.
Or my parents' number when I was a kid: CIrcle 5 - 6795.
It was quite a help in those days, with the phone exchange word in front of the number. You could actually tell what part of the city the business or residence was located, by looking at a list of the exchanges in the directory. The exchange names were assigned by area.
shareMost localities used four- or five-digit phone numbers until after WWII, which gave up to 100,000 possible phone numbers for a local area. Even to this day, in my town many older residents will write their phone number as "2-9999," with the first two (unwritten) digits understood. Larger cities with more than 100,000 telephones got beyond this five-digit limit by giving stylish, happy names to a two digit prefix, based on the matching of letters to numbers on the telephone dial. Thus, in Minneapolis, "Juniper 8" (588) was an exchange in Robbinsdale, while "Sterling 9" (789) was in northeast Minneapolis. The phone numbers were written "JU8-5444" and if the full prefix was spelled out, the convention was to capitalize the first two letters, as "JUniper 8-5444." A Ray Bradbury short story used this to good effect by having the lead character dialing numbers like "LIberty 4-1776" to speak to one of the Founding Fathers of the USA, for example.
But the phone company (there was only one in those days, AT&T) next had to go to area codes, and as cities got bigger with more area codes and long distance calling got more common, the "JUniper" convention got more and more uncomfortable, sandwiched between an area code and the rest of the phone number. Shortly after the introduction of "ZIP codes" (which stands for Zone Improvement Plan, by the way) AT&T went to 7-digit phone numbers and dropped the prefix names nationwide.
Great information, and a very lucid explanation.
Thank you so much!
-Jim McGee
I am 46 and remember in the late 60's here in Los Angeles and even into the early 70's some TV commercials still used excahnges for phone numbers. I lived in Pasadena and one exchange was RIchmond 9-7945 for example which was 749 etc...
shareSpeaking of the dropping of exchange names and going to "All Digit Dialing", the late Allan Sherman wrote a song about that called "The Let's All Call Up AT&T and Protest to the President March". You can find the lyrics at http://dmdb.org/lyrics/sherman.celebrity.html.
shareWhen telephone numbers were originally assigned, there were no dials. You picked up the receiver to make a call and, instead of a dial tone, you got a live female voice asking "Number please?". "Murray Hill 1111", or "Butterfield 9999", or "Pennsylvania 5000", or whatever, you told her. She said "9999?" You said yes and there was Gloria at the other end. In 1930, the phone company added the additional number, so now Gloria was at Butterfield8-9999. Eventually, dials were introduced to some exchanges. You just dialed BU8-9999, which is why the B and U were highlighted by being capitalized when the exchange name was written. But the exchange name was still spelled out in full because many people did not have dial phones and still told the operator they wanted BUtterfield8-9999. Fast forward another 30 years, all phones are dial phones and BU8-9999 became 288-9999. It doesn't have the same character. I can't imagine Glen Miller's band singing "736-5000."
shareBefore I even went to the message board, I was torn by two possibilities for the meaning of "BUtterfield 8." My earliest memories were of 5-digit phone numbers, which were direct-dialed on a rotary phone, so at first I thought "BUtterfield 8" had something to do with a phone number, but when I rewound to the first instance "BUtterfield 8" was mentioned, Gloria dialed seven digits, said "Butterfield 8," then asked for her messages. So the other possibility came to mind, that she worked for an escort service, or at the very least, used an answering service. She directed her mother to turn it off and forward her the bill to Boston once she was settled.
Wouldn't BU-8 have much more meaning to Wes engraved on a lighter if it signified something other than a common phone number exchange?
BUtterfield8 was, and 288 is, a telephone exchange on the east side of Manhattan.
share"Insulted by the money which she never takes from men, Gloria, whose dress is torn, takes Liggett's wife Emily's mink coat to cover herself and scrawls "No Sale" in lipstick on the mirror, but then orders her telephone exchange, Butterfield 8, to put Liggett through if he should call."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BUtterfield_8
My earliest experiences in using the family phone were about 15 years after this movie. Okay, Butterfield 8 is NOT an escort service, which I had figured out for myself as not likely. But why would she call her own exchange and get information on the 3 men who had called? Was that part of the job of being a telephone operator? How could she direct anyone to "put Liggett through"?
Oh wait, if she dialed 7 digits, did she call her own phone at her mother's and her mother or her friend relayed the messages?
Indeed, "Pennsylvania 6-5000" has a much better ring to it, so to speak.
But one question regarding "BUtterfield-8": Shouldn't this film be called "BUtterfield-8-5000" or something? When she calls up her answering service and says, "This is BUtterfield-8," how would they know it was her without the last four digits?
I suspect the filmmakers didn't want people calling BUtterfield-8-5000 in various area codes and asking for "services."
And why wouldn't it just be "BUtter-8," or even "BUt-8"? Why the long word, when only the first two letters matter? I guess "BUtterfield" is more elegant than "BUt."
Why Butterfield? I don't know the origin of Butterfield, but most telephone exchanges referred to the area they served. Pennsylvania served the area around Pennsylvania Station; Murray Hill is a neighborhood in the east 30s; Rector is a street downtown; etc. It may also have been the case that, when you had to tell the operator the number you wanted her to get for you, a long, distinctive name was easier for her to hear.
Why Butterfield 8? Apparently, the author of the novel was impressed with the phone company's adding a number after the name of the exchange in 1930. At the beginning of the book he reprints the NY Tel announcement that you will from now on need to use the extra number. I don't have the book in front of me, but somewhere in this thread, I think I quoted the exact announcement.
Thanks for the details! I didn't realize the exchanges tried to fit the areas they serve. That would certainly make them easier to remember, but wouldn't it be difficult to make the number fit the word just for the sake of a clever prefix? My parents still used the prefix word long after we had numbers (I don't remember it now), but I don't think it had anything to do with our city.
So did the book address those other four digits in Gloria's phone number? When she uses just "BUtterfield 8" to call her answering service, how would they know what number it was with just the prefix? Obviously, they didn't want to use a real phone number in this movie.
Thinking up clever prefixes was not the point. Think in terms of small towns 100 years ago. If you wanted to call cousin Fred 20 miles away in Podunk, you asked the operator for long distance. The long distance operator came on the line and asked "What city?" You said "Podunk". She connected you to the Podunk operator and you told her "number 21". Fast forward 30 years and now you ask the operator for Podunk 21. If you have a dial phone you dial PO 21. Maybe, Podunk is so big now they have to add a second office and they pick a name out of a hat, like Butterfield, to refer to that one. By the 1960s, everybody had a 7 digit number and cousin Fred might be PO6-5555. That soon became 766-5555. Nowadays, when they create new exchanges, they just string three numbers together without any reference to a name, but there are still plenty of the old names hiding in some exchange numbers.
In the novel, there is no scene with Gloria getting messages from her answering service.
That would certainly make them easier to remember, but wouldn't it be difficult to make the number fit the word just for the sake of a clever prefix?
It's not hard at all. You just pick a name, any name, then the first two digits of every phone number in that area will be the ones that match those first two letters (look at the letters on your phone dial). That's why none of the letters are on the 0 or the 1: dialing those numbers first gets you either the operator or a long distance exchange, so you don't want any of the prefixes to start with them. Adding that third digit (like the 8 in BUtterfield 8) allowed them to not have to worry much about "collisions", such as having both a BUtterfield exchange and an ATtenborough exchange which would both be 28.
Even in the 1960s when I was a kid, the exchange names were in common use, and not just in older neighborhoods. My suburban subdivision wasn't built until right around 1960, but we had a "name" exchange: SLocum (which, if I'm remembering right, was taken from the name of the builder / construction company that built that subdivision). When I was in elementary school every phone number in the area started with either Slocum4 or SLocum5 (754 or 755). By the time I was in high school in the late 1970s, the verbal use of Slocum had largely died out, but it was still true that every phone number in the local neighborhoods all started with 754 or 755.
So did the book address those other four digits in Gloria's phone number?
I haven't read the book. However, from what I understand the book was written in the mid-1930s and the woman upon whom Gloria was loosely based died in 1931. So the book probably doesn't address the other four digits because they simply wouldn't have existed yet for that person. share
Thanks for the elaboration, PillowRock. When I initially wrote that post, I was under the impression that the prefix "word" (like "BUtterfield") had some connection to the locality rather than just being a somewhat random word whose first two letters corresponded to numbers on the phone's keypad. Almost all numbers on the keypad contain vowels, so that makes coining words even easier.
As for the second point, about the last four digits in Gloria's phone number, are you saying that in the '30s, phone numbers had only three digits because of a lack of users? So BUtterfield-8 might be a complete telephone number (288), after the area code of course?
I was under the impression that the prefix "word" (like "BUtterfield") had some connection to the locality rather than just being a somewhat random word whose first two letters corresponded to numbers on the phone's keypad.
All sorts of different words were adopted over the years in order to fit in with available codes. Many of the earlier assignments were indeed related in some way to the locality, but in a big city it became increasingly difficult to come up with appropriate words which did not clash with prefixes which were already in use.
As I'm British, I'll use some of the old 3L-4N exchanges from London to illustrate the variety, as I'm more familiar with the origins of the names.
Some names, especially the longest-established ones, are clearly geographical in origin, such as CENtral, WEStern, and NORth. Many others were indeed named for the specific districts or neighborhoods they served, such as FINchley, HOLborn, MAYfair, and WHItehall. In other cases, names which related to some prominent local feature were adopted, such as MUSeum for the area of Bloomsbury in which the well-known British Museum is located, TERminus in Kings Cross due to the big railway station there, and CLIssold for a part of Dalston which included a park of that name. Sometimes a name which related to some dominant business or activity in the area was employed, e.g. when PADdington needed a second prefix to cope with demand, AMBassador was chosen, because the district was already home to a good many foreign embassies. All of the above names were in use by the end of the 1920's, by the way.
Sometimes more imaginative names were employed, or names which had a rather more tenuous link to the area, e.g. from the 1930's onward London acquired several exchanges named for famous poets and writers, such as BYRon, WORdsworth, and KEAts (that last one being one of the last new names assigned in 1965). There were even one or two names which could be considered almost whimsical, e.g. SKYport which came into use in 1956 to serve the expanding area around Harlington, which included Heathrow Airport.
The problem of coming up with suitable names is why American cities such as New York, Chicago, and the others which had initially adopted the 3L-4N format later changed to 2L-5N. To take some entirely made up names, with 3L-4N if you had CENtral you could not also have, say, BENbrook (both 236). But if you changed to 2L-5N, there was nothing to stop you having CEntral 6 (236) and BEnbrook 5 (235). If at some point BEnbrook 5 reached its capacity of 10,000 numbers in use, you could then add BEnbrook 2, BEnbrook 3, or some other code with the same base name. With 3L-4N you would have to come up with a completely new name, as with some of those London examples above.
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As for the second point, about the last four digits in Gloria's phone number, are you saying that in the '30s, phone numbers had only three digits because of a lack of users? So BUtterfield-8 might be a complete telephone number (288), after the area code of course?
It certainly wasn't a complete phone number in New York City in the 1930's. And remember that there was no such thing as an area code in those days.
However, there were certainly small communities and rural areas at that time in which 3-digit local numbers were quite sufficient, with many small towns having 4-digit numbering, and larger places having 5- or 6-digit numbers as necessary. The 3- and 4-digit schemes were generally just all numeric, so your number might be 285 or 4731. The 5- and 6-digit schemes I mentioned further up this thread. Some places had mixed length numbers were a city expanded, so it was quite possible to find, say, 4- and 5-digit numbers within the same town (this was still common in Britain into the 1970's and early 1980's, typically with 4-digit numbers beginning with 2, 3 or 4 in the middle of town and 5-digit numbers beginning with, say, 6 or 7 in the expanding suburbs).
But back in the 1930's many places had completely manual service (as in no dial on the phone, just pick up and wait for the operator to come on the line and ask "Number please?"). Where a district had manual working, your number would generally be expressed as the exchange name (no special capitalization) followed by the number, and because the calls were all connected by the operator, they could just number from 1 upwards. So, to take another fictitious name, you could quite easily have Eastside 4, Eastside 83, Eastside 408, and Eastside 2093 all co-existing. When such an area was converted to dial working, the "short" numbers would generally be padded out to make them the same length, so if the manual Eastside exchange became EAstside 6 when it went to dial operation, then Eastside 408 might become EAstside 6-0408.
Then in many places there were party lines which involved even more different numbering schemes!
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Hello, Paulcoxwell:
Thanks very much for your interesting and informative briefing on the telephone numbering system. Obviously telecommunications was initially a patchwork system that served local communities but that later grew by leaps and bounds to accommodate more users – and is growing even faster and in more directions in this digital age.
I'm old enough (barely) to remember party lines. Sometimes as late as the early '70s I'd pick up the phone to make a call and hear two parties already conversing. I'd have to hang up the phone and check back later for a dial tone. I remember our phone ringing once, answering it, and another party answering at the same time. The caller told me to hang up, that he didn't want to talk to me. I thought that was rather rude, but I guess this was typical considering the limits of the party-line system, which presumably allowed many users on a system that was already becoming maxed out.
Obviously telecommunications was initially a patchwork system that served local communities but that later grew by leaps and bounds to accommodate more users
That's pretty much it, and that's partly why in earlier times there was such a variety of different numbering schemes to suit the local conditions (and the telephone company's preferences). Gradually, towns and cities became connected together, until eventually it became possible to place a call coast-to-coast across the United States.
But even if a town had dial service, there was no need for any sort of numbering consistency with other areas because each system stood largely alone in that respect. You could dial numbers in your own town and the surrounding area it served, but to call anywhere else required the services of an operator who would contact her counterpart in the place you were calling to complete the connection.
Where a community of interest existed between nearby places, it became commonplace to make arrangements to allow calls to be dialed directly between those two places, by chosing local routing codes which fitted into the numbering schemes of both. For example, you might be in a town with 5-digit numbers in the range 2-xxxx through 5-xxxx and have another smaller town a few miles away with 4-digit numbers of 2xxx and 3xxx. The telephone company might set it up so that you could call that smaller town by dialing, say, 7 plus the number, while users in that smaller town could call you by dialing 8 plus your 5-digit number. These codes were very much local in nature, e.g. you might have another smaller town on the opposite side of you who could also reach you directly, but people there might have to dial 6 to reach you, or 70, or some other such code.
Bringing this back to the city which is the subject of this movie, due to the volume of telephone traffic between New York and the parts of New Jersey immediately across the Hudson, an arrangement existed there for many years in which users could call across the river (in either direction) by dialing 11 plus the number.
Area codes in the form with which people are familiar today were devised in 1947, initially to be used by operators to speed the connection of long-distance calls by allowing them to dial directly through an automated network to reach the desired city instead of having to pass the number through other operators (up until this point a long-distance call could involve multiple operators, e.g. your operator in small-town upstate New York connected to New York City, the New York operator contacted her counterpart in Chicago, who in turn connected to Denver, who connected to San Francisco, etc.).
It was this plan which set out that eventually all telephone numbers in the U.S. & Canada would be made up to 7-digits in length, using the 2L-5N format, and with a 3-digit area code. The first trials of customer DDD (Direct Distance Dialing) took place in 1951, when users in and around Englewood, N.J. could direct dial to a small number of specific cities around the country, including as far away as Oakland and San Francisco, Calif. DDD didn't start to be rolled out on a large scale until the late 1950's/early 1960's, and obviously it took many more years before it became universal.
I'm old enough (barely) to remember party lines. Sometimes as late as the early '70s I'd pick up the phone to make a call and hear two parties already conversing. I'd have to hang up the phone and check back later for a dial tone.
You might find this thread about party lines of interest:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053172/board/flat/9341365
And I posted some more comments about numbering, DDD, etc. in these:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046912/board/flat/141423850?d=149713294
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040202/board/flat/71134078?d=91515139
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Thanks very much for the information and the links, PaulCoxwell! Interesting stuff. I imagine folks at the time thought the phone system was as high-tech as it would ever get, but of course it keeps getting more and more sophisticated (and sometimes complicated).
shareYes, there are certainly significant changes which come along every so often and sometimes take people by surprise at the speed with which they're adopted, although on the other hand some ideas have never really taken off as expected. Back in the mid 1960's when videophones were being hailed as the next "big thing," it seems that some commentators thought they'd be pretty common by the mid 1980's. Another 25 years on from there and they're still just not something most people want.
Back on the exchange name issue, there were names which were considered more or less desirable to some people, based upon their (sometimes imagined) social status and the association of the name with a particular neighborhood. Exchange boundaries are chosen for technical reasons, and seldom coincide with actual borough or district boundaries in a large city, and the overlap sometimes caused people living in a certain area to raise objections at being associated with what they regarded as a much more downmarket name.
For example, some people living on a particular fringe of the FULham exchange area in London objected to having numbers which implied an association with Fulham itself, a decidely less desirable district at the time. The result was that the G.P.O. came up with an alternate name of DUKe for some subscribers served out of FULham. Of course, FUL and DUK are both exactly the same code.
A similar situation existed in LEYtonstone, another decidely downmarket neighborhood, and for a few years some numbers were instead published as KEYstone, although the identical digits must have been even more obvious on that one!
In one case in the 1930's, a proposed new exchange name was changed for all users even before it went into service: It had been intended to call it BEThnal Green, another less-than-desirable neighborhood in the East End of London, but pressure resulted in the adoption of an alternate name which matched the same digits. So subscribers ended up with the totally meaningless (but presumably more "socially acceptable") name of ADVance.
Interestingly enough it's not only the Glenn Miller song of that name that used the name of a phone exhange. Other examples are the song "Beechwood 4-5789" by the Marvelettes as well as the name of the late 1950s-early 1960s vocal group the Fleetwoods (it was the name of the phone exchange of Olympia, WA where the group came from).
shareI love that song. So we have "BEechwood 4-5789" and "PEnnsylvania 6-5000." Are there any other song titles that use the name of the phone exchange?
shareAre there any other song titles that use the name of the phone exchange?
Hawkshaw Hawkins had a hit song in 1963 (#1 on the U.S. country charts) with a fictitious exchange and number as the title: "LOnesome 7-7203." Lyrics:
Had our number changed today although I hated to,
But each time the phone would ring they'd want to speak to you,
And it hurts to tell them you're not here with me,
Maybe now old telephone will let me be.
It's not in the book now so you'd better write it down,
Just in case your love for me should ever come around,
You might want to call and break the news to me,
Just call LOnesome 7-7203.
I keep the telephone beside me all the time,
Hoping you might want to call and say you've changed your mind,
If you do then darling you know where I'll be,
I'm at LOnesome 7-7203.
You're the only one I'm giving our new number to,
So now if the telephone should ring I'll know it's you,
If you ever long for love that used to be,
Just call LOnesome 7-7203......
Just call LOnesome 7-7203.
And although not part of the title itself, the classic "Promised Land" by Chuck Berry contains a telephone number reference to TIdewater 4-1009 (sung as "Tidewater four, ten-oh-nine"):
I left my home in Norfolk, Virginia,
California on my mind,
Straddled that Greyhound, and rode him past Raleigh,
On across Caroline.
We stopped in Charlotte and bypassed Rock Hill,
We never was a minute late,
Ninety miles out of Atlanta by sundown,
Rollin' 'cross the Georgia state.
We had motor trouble it turned into a struggle,
Half way 'cross Alabam',
And that 'hound broke down and left us all stranded,
In downtown Birmingham.
Straight off, I bought me a through train ticket,
Right across Mississippi clean,
And I was on that midnight flyer out of Birmingham,
Smoking into New Orleans.
Somebody help me get out of Louisiana,
Just help me get to Houston town,
There's people there who care a little 'bout me,
And they won't let the poor boy down.
Sure as you're born, they bought me a silk suit,
Put luggage in my hands,
And I woke up high over Albuquerque,
On a jet to the promised land.
Workin' on a T-bone steak a la carte,
Flying over to the Golden State,
The pilot told me in thirteen minutes,
We'd be landing' at the terminal gate.
Swing low chariot, come down easy,
Taxi to the terminal zone,
Cut your engines and cool your wings,
And let me make it to a telephone.
Los Angeles get me Norfolk, Virginia,
TIdewater four ten-oh-nine,
Tell the folks back home this is the promised land callin',
And the poor boy is on the line.
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Thanks very much! I see that the Hankshaw Hawkins song was his biggest hit, but it debuted just three days before he was killed in a plane crash (with Patsy Cline), so he would never know. And for as many times as I've heard "Promised Land," I always thought that was an address, though obviously he's making a phone call. Thanks again.
shareAnother one I have in my collection came to mind after posting those lyrics last week: "Bigelow 6-200" by Brenda Lee. It was one of her very early recordings (she's actually credited as "Little Brenda Lee" on the record label).
I did a little searching and found the recording online. Click on the play button over to the right of this page:
http://www.last.fm/music/Brenda+Lee/_/Bigelow+6-200
Thanks for that, and what a rockin' tune! The voice thoughout her career is unmistakably Brenda Lee.
Here's another one: "Echo Valley 2-6809" by the Partridge Family, a song apparently written long after those prefixes became obsolete.
Thanks for that, and what a rockin' tune!
It sure is! It's the flip side of her version of "Jambalaya," her first record for Decca in 1956. Curiously, there seems to have been some confusion about her age, as the label says "Little Brenda Lee (9 years old)" although she was born in December 1944, which would have made her 11 when it was released. But unmistakably Brenda Lee, as you say, and a great voice on such a young girl.
Here's another one: "Echo Valley 2-6809" by the Partridge Family, a song apparently written long after those prefixes became obsolete.
I don't recall ever hearing that one before, but looking it up it appears to have been released in 1971. Although most places abandoned the 2L-5N scheme for straight 7-digit dialing through the 1960's, there were in fact some American cities which retained names into the 1970's. Philadelphia was one of the last places to scrap them completely, sometime late in the decade. New York City also had a mixture of straight 7-digit numbers and 2L-5N in the early 1970's, although by that time some of the latter were using meaningless two-letter combinations rather than the first two letters of real names.
Over here in England, the official changeover to all-figure numbering took place over a much shorter period because of the monopoly telephone system run by the Post Office. All the 3L-4N numbers in London and the other large cities were changed to a straight 7 digits between 1966 and 1969.
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I didn't realize U.S. cities were still using the "name" prefixes in the early '70s. I know my parents continued to refer to our phone number as a "name" and then five digits well into the '70s and even '80s, but that's because we had the same number pretty much since they married, which was in 1957.
A lot of older people continued to use the name with the phone numbers long after the phone company had gone to a strictly numeric system simply because it was easier to remember names than numbers – at least for most people.
Of course, today you still have businesses like 1-800-DENTIST that have "vanity" phone numbers to make it easier to remember. Government agencies do this a lot too. I think this causes confusion when people dial "zero" instead of the letter O (which would be 6).
I used to know someone named Dean who gave me his number as (prefix)-DEAN, which made it easier to remember, as long as I recalled his prefix (which I don't now). I guess most phone numbers could also form a word or several words. I wonder if there's a Web site or algorithm (for people who understand that stuff – I most certainly don't) that would provide "word" options if you plug in a phone number?
I didn't realize U.S. cities were still using the "name" prefixes in the early '70s.
It was only some. The change took place over a fairy long period of time, and in fact there were one or two places which went directly from their pre-DDD 5- or 6-digit local numbering schemes to a straight 7 digits in the late 1950's without adopting the 2L-5N system in between.
A lot of older people continued to use the name with the phone numbers long after the phone company had gone to a strictly numeric system simply because it was easier to remember names than numbers – at least for most people.
It wasn't so easy to do that for a lot of people over here when London changed to all-figure numbering. The G.P.O. took the opportunity to introduce a new routing system at the same time, and as a result only about one-third of London's exchange names retained the same prefix. The rest were all assigned completely different prefixes for the new plan, and thus the name association was lost.
Examples: MAYfair remained the same, becoming just 629, but LABurnum (522) became 360.
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Most localities used four- or five-digit phone numbers until after WWII, which gave up to 100,000 possible phone numbers for a local area.
It was actually somewhat less than that for a five-digit numbering scheme, since zero was reserved for reaching the operator and for historical, technical reasons it was considered bad practice to have subscriber numbers starting with the digit 1. A few other codes were generally reserved for service and engineering functions, taking out a few more hundreds or thousands ranges, so in practice a five-digit scheme would provide for a little less than 80,000 numbers maximum.
Larger cities with more than 100,000 telephones got beyond this five-digit limit by giving stylish, happy names to a two digit prefix, based on the matching of letters to numbers on the telephone dial. Thus, in Minneapolis, "Juniper 8" (588) was an exchange in Robbinsdale, while "Sterling 9" (789) was in northeast Minneapolis. The phone numbers were written "JU8-5444" and if the full prefix was spelled out, the convention was to capitalize the first two letters, as "JUniper 8-5444."
There were several other schemes used in different areas and at different times in the United States. Some towns with five-digit numbering plans used a letter as the first digit, often based upon an exchange name serving the particular area of town, so you could have numbers such as Central 1234, North 5678, or Riverside 9000, which would be dialed as C-1234, N-5678, and R-9000 respectively.
For many years somewhat larger cities had six-digit numbering in the 2L-4N form (2 letters + 4 numbers), giving numbers such as DUpont 6200 (dialed and sometimes written as DU-6200) or SUnset 9999. Both Washington D.C. and Los Angeles used this format at one time.
Large cities used seven-digit numbering from the early days of automatic dialing, where the first three digits specified the exchange area within the city. The 2L-5N format was common, but several U.S. cities, including New York, initially adopted a 3L-4N format. Hence there was BUTterfield 1234 etc. The few American cities using 3L-4N changed to 2L-5N in later years, New York doing so around 1930 (and Chicago in the late 1940s).
next had to go to area codes, and as cities got bigger with more area codes and long distance calling got more common, the "JUniper" convention got more and more uncomfortable, sandwiched between an area code and the rest of the phone number.
It wasn't so much the name being "uncomfortable," since DDD (Direct Distance Dialing) and 2L-5N dialing co-existed for many years. A couple of metropolitan areas still officially retained named exchanges and "letter dialing" until the end of the 1970s. In fact it was the DDD plan of the late 1940s which required that all numbers eventually be made up to seven digits in length, and the original plan called for ALL areas to adopt the 2L-5N numbering convention.
The problem was of finding suitable names to best utilize the matching numbers. This was an extension of the issue which had led New York (among other places) to change from 3L-4N to 2L-5N some years earlier. With three-letter names, it's almost impossible to come up with meaningful names for many number combinations - e.g. from 995 you can get WWJ, WWK, WWL, WXJ, WXK, WXL, XWJ, XWK, and so on, none of which is very useful. Since there are no letters on the 1 or 0 digit, it also made it impossible to use any exchange prefix containing a 1 or 0. Changing to 2L-5N eased the situation somewhat (e.g. for 995 you have WYoming 5 or WYandotte 5), but still left many prefixes impossible to name. That's why mobile numbers were frequently allocated "meaningless" letter-code numbers such as JK2-1234 or WJ-9876, to make use of those otherwise "useless" prefixes.
But ultimately, changing to ANC (All Number Calling) meant that those restrictions no longer applied and that all potentially valid prefixes could be used.
Another reason for dropping letters eventually was the introduced of IDDD (International Direct Distance Dialing). Even in other English-speaking countries the letters on the dials were not always in the same place as on North American dials. For example, on British dials the letter "O" is on the digit zero, not on digit 6. London still used 3L-4N numbering until the change to all-figure numbering the late 1960s, so imagine the confusion which could be caused by, say, somebody in the U.S. using a U.S. dial trying to call the London number ACOrn 1234 (which would be 226-1234 in the U.S. but 220-1234 in Britain). A similar problem arose in the reverse direction, of course.
But the phone company (there was only one in those days, AT&T)
Only the one long-distance provider, but remember that there were many independent telephone companies providing local service in some areas, from GTE - the largest independent - right down to little "mom & pop" type companies in some rural areas.
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several U.S. cities, including New York, initially adopted a 3L-4N format. Hence there was BUTterfield 1234 etc. The few American cities using 3L-4N changed to 2L-5N in later years
Apropos to this movie:
It may be worth explicitly noting that BUTerfield-1234 and BUtterfield 8-1234 are the same number. share
It may be worth explicitly noting that BUTerfield-1234 and BUtterfield 8-1234 are the same number.
It should also be noted that not every exchange in New York City kept the same prefix after the changeover from 3L-4N to 2L-5N around the end of 1930.
For example, CIRcle (247) became CIrcle 7, FLAtbush (352) became FLatbush 2, and the famous PENnsylvania (736) became PEnnsylvania 6 - All the same numbers. But other prefixes were changed to allow for some reorganization of the codes, e.g. FLUshing (358) became FLushing 9 (359), PLAza (752) became PLaza 3 (753), and PROspect (776) became PRospect 9 (779).
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Ours were
PRescott=77
PLaza=75
SWift=79
MOhawk=66
As a young child, I knew my phone number as WIndsor 6-9057. I still think of it as that today.
shareAs a young child, I knew my phone number as WIndsor 6-9057.
In many exchanges the 9xxx numbers were used for coinphones (with 99xx being reserved for telephone company test numbers, official lines, and so on).
As your old number demonstrates though, this was not universally so, despite the fact that some people mistakenly believed that 9xxx numbers were always coinphones, in every area.
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