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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]
Until about 1966 UK phones used a different scheme than currently used for relating letter to number keys. While generally similar, the scheme did not include the letters "O" and "Q" on the "6" and "7" keys to avoid confusion between the digit "0" and the letters; the zero key was used for "O" and "Q".
The Australian letter-to-number mapping was A=1, B=2, F=3, J=4, L=5, M=6, U=7, W=8, X=9, Y=0, so the phone number BX 3701 was in fact 29 3701. When Australia around 1960 changed to all-numeric telephone dials, a mnemonic to help people associate letters with numbers was the sentence, "All Big Fish Jump Like Mad Under Water eXcept Yabbies ."
In the UK, letters were assigned to numbers in a similar fashion to North America, except that the letter O was allocated to the digit 0 (zero); digit 6 had only M and N. The letter Q was later added to the zero position on British dials, in anticipation of direct international dialing to Paris, which commenced in 1963.
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.
The 'core' code of 0803 was allocated to a five-figure linked numbering scheme covering exchanges in Torquay (numbers starting with 2, 3 and 6) and Paignton (numbers starting with 4 or 5). 0804 was then introduced to cover a ring of 13 smaller satellite exchanges outside Torbay [12] with subscriber numbers starting at 2xx or 2xxx on each exchange.
These letter assignments have been used for multiple purposes. Originally, they referred to the leading letters of telephone exchange names. In the mid-20th century United States, before the switch to All-Number Calling, telephone numbers had seven digits, including a two-digit prefix which was expressed in letters rather than digits, e.g.; KL5 ...
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.