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Rotary dial. A traditional North American rotary telephone dial on the Western Electric 500. The associative lettering was originally used for dialing named exchanges but was kept because it facilitated memorization of telephone numbers. A rotary dial is a component of a telephone or a telephone switchboard that implements a signaling ...
Telephone numbers listed in 1920 in New York City having three-letter exchange prefixes. In the United States, the most-populous cities, such as New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, initially implemented dial service with telephone numbers consisting of three letters and four digits (3L-4N) according to a system developed by W. G. Blauvelt of AT&T in 1917. [1]
Telephone dial number card of c.1948 with the local telephone number 4-5876 in Atlantic City, NJ, using the central office prefix 4, later converted to AT4. Face of a 1939 rotary telephone dial with the telephone number LA-2697, which includes the first two letters of Lakewood, New Jersey, as the central office prefix, later converted to LA6.
As phone lines became more popular—between 1942 and 1962, the number of phones in the U.S. grew 230% to 76 million—telephone companies realized they would run out of phone numbers.
Candlestick telephone. A Western Electric desk stand telephone of the 1920s and 30s. The candlestick telephone (or pole telephone) is a style of telephone that was common from the late 1890s to the 1940s. A candlestick telephone is also often referred to as a desk stand, an upright, or a stick phone. Candlestick telephones featured a mouthpiece ...
A party line (multiparty line, shared service line, party wire) is a local loop telephone circuit that is shared by multiple telephone service subscribers. [1][2][3] Party line systems were widely used to provide telephone service, starting with the first commercial switchboards in 1878. [4] A majority of Bell System subscribers in the mid-20th ...
Rotary system. The rotary machine switching system, or most commonly known as the rotary system, was a type of automatic telephone exchange manufactured and used primarily in Europe from the 1910s. The system was developed and tested by AT&T's American engineering division, Western Electric, in the United States, at the same time when Western ...
A rotary dial telephone, c. 1940s. A telephone, colloquially referred to as a phone, is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly.