Updated February 4, 2024
The listing of area codes only includes those 348 located in the United States.
In the beginning of the world with telephones, things were easy. You didn’t even call a number, you just called your operator and asked them to hook you up with someone in your town. Need the Doctor, you could not only ask the operator to connect you with one but ask which one she’d suggest. Eventually, the phone system expanded beyond just local networks and started connecting towns, counties, states, and nations. The first step was putting in a number system so that each person could dial another directly, but then there weren’t enough numbers. Area Code Day celebrates the solution that has become a part of our everyday existence ever since.
- Area Codes first came into existence in 1940 in the laboratories of AT&T and Bell, slowly but surely this idea was expanded on and developed until it finally went into effect in 1947.
- 1951 – Direct long-distance dialing is implemented throughout the U.S.
- 1982 – The Bell System stops its service in 1982 and the Bell Telephone company closes its doors in 1983.
- There’re some creative ideas that were implemented to help make dialing easier, including how the numbers were distributed. Live in an area that has a lot of people in it? They’ll be assigned area codes that have lower numbers at the beginning and end. Why? Well, in those days phone calls were made with rotary dialers, and it was determined that those in denser populated areas should be able to dial faster. How do you make rotary phones dial faster? By using numbers that were closer to zero so they had a shorter pull time.
- Up until about the 1950s, phone numbers were alphanumeric, eventually settling on a 2-letter, 5-number system that usually identified the region of the phone number and also aimed to make it more memorable.
- (866) 666-6666 currently belongs to a limousine service in New York City, and to register this sought-after number must not have been any small feat. Not long ago, the cellphone number 666-6666 (area code unknown) sold for $2.7 million.
- 911 emergency service wasn’t standardized in North America until the 1980s.
- 86…The number of area code assignments, or Numbering Plan Areas (NPAs), that existed in North America in 1947, when the system was first put into place. According to telephone researcher Linc Madison, 34 states and D.C. had just one area code at the time, while New York had five and a single area code covered three Canadian provinces. At the time, Alaska and Hawaii were not states and did not initially get a long distance code.
- Toward the end of 2007, the small town of Reeves, Louisiana, finally rid itself of a telephone area code that had been bedeviling its citizens since the 1960s — 666. Christians in Reeves were unhappy having the “number of the beast” for their prefix since being assigned it. When the phone company finally relented, allowing Reevesians to change over to “749” at no charge, mayor Scott Walker called their decision “divine intervention.”
- Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia is the Fear of the number six hundred sixty-six.
- Legend has it that Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak (who was really into repeating digits, hence pricing the Apple I at $666.66) once owned the phone number 888-8888.
- Phone numbers famously appear in songs as well, perhaps the most memorable being Glenn Miller’s Pennsylvania 6-5000. Today the number still exists as (212) 736-5000 (“73” replaces the “PE” of the old number) and will get you through to the Hotel Pennsylvania of the song title. The hotel happily claims that it’s the “New York phone number in longest continuous use.”
- There’s a neat phone number-related trick you can impress your friends with, thanks to the magic of math. Take a seven-digit phone number, for example, 941-7990. Multiply the first three digits by 80. Add one. Multiply by 250. Add the last four digits of the original phone number. Add the last four digits again. Subtract 250 and divide by two.
- Thanks to services like PhoneSpell, you can find out if any of your phone numbers offer interesting “phonewords.” Enter your digits and the site will generate a list of interesting combinations. If you’ve lucked out, it may provide a better way to remember your number in future.
- Why 7 Digits: Our short-term memory is a finite resource. Countless psychological experiments have shown that, on average, many of us are limited in terms of the amount of information he or she, can receive, process and remember. In fact, the longest sequence a normal person can recall on the fly contains about seven items. This limit, which psychologist George Miller dubbed as the “magical number seven” when he discovered it in 1956, explains some of the bounds on our capacity for processing information.
- The current total of possible phone numbers is 1,601,380,000…or 7.91 million numbers per area code.
- The very first cellular phone had a talk time of just 30 minutes before the battery died.
- Mark Twain was one of the first people who owned a telephone in the U.S. and declined to invest in the Bell company when an opportunity was given him.
- The first phone book came out in 1878 and consisted of only 20 pages.
- There are 317 geographic area codes in the United States and an additional 18 non-geographic area codes totalling 335 US area codes.
- The states using the most area codes are California which is currently using 36 area codes, Texas 28 area codes, Florida 18 area codes, and New York 19 area codes.
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