Trivia

Alphanumeric Trivia Because the switches were hard-wired together and fairly hard to re-wire (or re-grade), telephone exchange buildings in many larger cities were dedicated to circuits that began with the first two or three digits of the (in North America) standard 7 digit phone numbers. In a holdover from the days of plug-board exchanges, the exchanges were typically named with a name whose first two letters translated to the digits of the exchange's prefix on a common telephone dial. Examples: CAstle (22), TRinity (87), MUtual (68). Certain number combinations were not amenable to this naming process, such as "57," "95" and "97;" it was in part due to this factor that telephone exchange names were eventually abandoned, as more numbers were needed to prevent a given area code from running out of available numbers.

In the past, the first two or three digits would map to a mnemonic exchange name, e.g. 869–1234 was formerly TOwnsend 9–1234, and before that (in some localities) might have been TOWnsend 1234 (only the capital letters and numbers being dialed).

In December of 1930, New York City became the first locality in the United States to adopt the two-letter, five-number format; it remained alone in this respect until well after World War II, when other municipalities across the country began to follow suit. From the 1920s through the 1950s, most larger U.S. cities used the Bell System standard format of two letters which began the exchange name followed by four numbers, as in DUnkirk 0799. Prior to the mid-1950s, the number immediately following the name could never be a "0" or "1;" indeed, "0" was never pressed into service at all, except in the immediate Los Angeles area (the "BEnsonhurst 0" exchange mentioned in an episode of the popular TV sitcom The Honeymooners was fictitious).

In 1955, the Bell System attempted to standardize the process of naming exchanges by issuing a "recommended list" of names to be used for the various number combinations. In 1961, New York Telephone introduced "selected-letter" exchanges, in which the two letters did not mark the start of any particular name (example: FL 6-9970), and by 1965 all newly-connected phone numbers nationwide consisted of numerals only (Wichita Falls, Texas had been the first locality in the United States to implement the latter, having done so in 1958). Pre-existing numbers continued to be displayed the old way in many places well into the 1970s. A Chicago carpet retailer frequently advertised their number NAtional 2-9000 on WGN until the 1990s; not to mention, the number TYler 8-7100 for a Detroit construction company.

Most of the United Kingdom had no lettered telephone dials until the introduction of Subscriber Trunk Dialling (STD) in 1958. Prior to that time, only the director areas (Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Liverpool, London and Manchester) and the non-director areas adjacent to them had lettered dials, and the director exchanges used the three-letter, four-number format. With the introduction of STD, the need for all callers to be able to dial numbers with letters in them led to the much more widespread use of lettered dials. The need for dials with letters was finally abandoned with the conversion to all-figure numbering in 1968.

Because the pulses in a Strowger switch exchange took time, having a phone number with lots of 8s or 9s or 0s meant it took longer to dial. The phone companies typically assigned such "high" numbers to pay phones because they were rarely dialed to.

To test the basic functioning of all of the switches in a chain, a special "test" number was reserved that consisted of all 5s (555–5555) — half-way up and in on each bank. The "555" (or KLondike) exchange was never assigned any real numbers (with limited exceptions such as 555-1212 for directory assistance), which is why today's TV and movie shows use 555-xxxx numbers for their phone numbers (previously, such productions often used numbers that ended in certain four-number combinations that were typically set aside for similar uses — "0079" on the West Coast and "9970" in many other places; examples include the TV series Perry Mason and the 1948 film Sorry, Wrong Number). That way there was no possibility that a fake number from a show would actually reach someone, thus avoiding the scenario which arose in 1982 with Tommy Tutone's hit single 867-5309/Jenny, which led to many customers who actually had that number receiving a plethora of unwanted calls. In fact, many US phone companies either no longer assign this number, or have relegated it to internal testing purposes.

However, today only numbers beginning with 555–01xx are reserved for fiction and other 555-numbers can be allocated to "information providers". A side effect of the fictional-number pool being reduced to 100 numbers is that the same ones now often recur in different movies or TV shows. The "958" and "959" exchanges have also been reserved for similar purposes in most localities, and as a result very few individuals or businesses have telephone numbers beginning with those sets of digits either (although this fact is not as well known, so such numbers have not been used in a fictional context).

The number in the Glenn Miller Orchestra's hit "PEnnsylvania 6-5000" was and is the number of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. If you call the number, now written as (212) 736-5000, you still get the hotel.

One of the most expensive phone numbers in the world is 666-6666 which was sold for USD$2.75 million in Doha, Qatar as part of a charity event in 2006.

Another is 888-8888, which was sold for USD$270,723 in Chengdu, China. 8 is traditionally considered a lucky number in Chinese culture. In Chinese, number 8 also sounded like the sound of father or daddy.

Computer industry pioneer Steve Wozniak, a collector of phone numbers, obtained the phone number 888-888-8888, but it proved unusable: Children playing with phones would dial it, resulting in more than a hundred wrong numbers a day.

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