@Mark Ollig
The Bell Telephone Company was founded July 9, 1877, in Boston, MA, by Alexander Graham Bell, his father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, and financial backer Thomas Sanders.
The Bell Telephone Company was founded July 9, 1877, in Boston, MA, by Alexander Graham Bell, his father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard, and financial backer Thomas Sanders.
It merged with the New England Telephone and Telegraph Company Feb. 17, 1879, to become the National Bell Telephone Company.
The company would manage the production, leasing, and installation of telephones and exchanges through the use of Bell’s patents.
The National Bell Telephone Company merged with the American Speaking Telephone Company to form the American Bell Telephone Company March 20, 1880, which became the central corporate entity for Bell interests in the US.
AT&T (American Telephone and Telegraph) was incorporated March 3, 1885, as a subsidiary of the American Bell Telephone Company.
In 1899, AT&T acquired the assets of the American Bell Telephone Company, becoming the parent company of the Bell System.
AT&T laid the foundation for a nationwide telephone network that began as an infrastructure of local telephone exchanges wired to open galvanized iron wires, similar to telegraph lines, strung and fastened on glass insulators attached to the wooden crossarms of telephone poles.
This early infrastructure formed a long-distance backbone between towns and cities, including New York City and Boston in 1885 and Chicago in 1892.
By 1920, the US network had more than 13 million telephones and approximately 32 million miles of telephone wire in use, forming a coast-to-coast network for long-distance calls.
Before 1951, making long-distance calls required telephone operators in different cities along the telephone network to manually patch connections through multiple switchboards, a process that could be time-consuming.
During the 1940s, efforts were already underway to reduce the time it took to process a call through the use of automated telephone switching equipment.
My mother and grandmother were switchboard operators in the 1930s and 1940s; my mother worked in Silver Lake, and my father’s mother worked in Winsted.
They told me stories of people calling the switchboard to ask who had died, where the fire was, why the church bells were ringing, and of using paper index cards to log patched calls for billing.
During the 1940s, when my mother operated the switchboard in Silver Lake, my father occasionally operated the Winsted switchboard.
They would talk with each other while patching calls between the two towns; they were married April 14, 1951.
In 1947, AT&T, along with the Bell System and independent telephone companies, developed the North American Numbering Plan (NANP).
This plan standardized telephone numbering, eventually leading to the development of direct distance dialing (DDD).
New Jersey was assigned to area code 201, and Winsted, 612.
Although the NANP would enable DDD, individual customer dialing was not yet available.
Significant upgrades to the telephone network were necessary to achieve DDD, including the implementation of Multifrequency (MF) signaling and automated toll switching equipment.
AT&T’s Long Lines division began installing relay-logic toll-switching equipment to manage calls that included area code prefixes, which enabled the expansion of DDD.
Operators switching from using rotary dials to MF pushbutton keypads significantly reduced the time it took to process long-distance calls.
After receiving the number to be called, an operator keyed in the digits using the MF keypad, which transmitted them to the telephone company’s toll office’s “sender equipment,” which processed the digits for automatic routing to their destination.
Note: MF signaling is different from what is used with your pushbutton touchtone phone, which sends DTMF (dual-tone multi-frequency) digit signaling.
MF was not used on the subscriber’s telephone; around 1962, the Western Electric No. 5 Crossbar underwent modifications to process DTMF digits.
The No. 5 Crossbar system was using MF signaling for trunk-to-trunk calls between telephone exchanges.
Up until Nov. 9, 1951, individual telephone subscribers were still unable to dial long-distance calls directly from their phones, but that was about to change.
A historic first in telecommunications occurred at 1 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 10, 1951, when Mayor Melvin Leslie Denning of Englewood, NJ, completed the first coast-to-coast, direct-distance-dialed telephone call without operator assistance.
The call was made to Mayor Frank P. Osborn in Alameda, CA, from a rotary dial telephone on a desk in the central telephone switching room at the New Jersey Bell offices in Englewood.
Denning dialed Mayor Osborn’s 10-digit phone number, starting with area code 415 (Oakland/Alameda).
Note: In the early to mid-1960s, the “1” prefix became necessary for long-distance dialing to resolve call routing conflicts because the first three digits dialed could be interpreted either as an area code (NPA) or a local telephone exchange office code (NXX).
For instance, if a customer in the 612 area code dialed 218-xxxx, the telephone network would not be able to distinguish whether it was a local call within the 612 area code or a long-distance call to the 218 area code.
By the way, 612-218 is a real NPA/NXX for the Twin Cities.
The “1” prefix allowed telephone switching equipment to differentiate between 10-digit long-distance calls and 7-digit local calls within a central office exchange.
But I digress.
Denning’s call was processed through a modified Western Electric No. 5 Crossbar switching system equipped for automatic digit analysis and routing, along with automatic message accounting (AMA), a paper-tape billing system used to track the call’s details.
About 18 seconds after Mayor Denning placed his call to Alameda, Mayor Osborn’s phone rang.
Upon answering, Osborn heard Denning ask, “Hello. How’s the weather out there?”
“Fine,” Osborn replied and joked if it is true that “people in New Jersey ride mosquitoes the same as we ride horses out here?” to which Denning chuckled – direct distance dialing’s journey had truly begun.
“The Nation at Your Fingertips” is a 1951 Library of Congress video (https://archive.org/details/the-nation-at-your-fingertips-1951) of an AT&T promotional film on telecommunications in Englewood, NJ.
