trivia

Say what you will about Ma Bell, you have to admit these people had vision. Phone company planners made a conscious decision to exclude Q the better part of a century ago and history has been proving they were geniuses ever since. It all started when the phone company began replacing human operators with mechanical switching equipment, which necessitated the use of dials. Bell wished to retain its folksy exchange names (since discontinued), but for reasons we'll get to in a moment elected to assign letters to only eight of the ten available digits. At three letters per number, that meant two were destined not to make the cut. Since Z was the last letter anyway, it was an easy one to eliminate. The selection of the other came down to deciding which of the remaining 25 was the most useless, the principal candidates presumably being Q and X. The records of the debate within the phone company on this weighty topic are lost to history. But it seems clear that since Q must always be followed by U, except in the case of foreign aberrations like QAtar, it lends itself to fewer letter combinations than X (although the possibility of ending up with brain-damaged appellations like XAnadu, XErxes and XRay strikes me as a pretty strong counterargument). In any case, X was chosen for immortality while Q was consigned to the dustbin of telephony.

The obvious question in all this is why the phone company didn't assign letters to the number 1, which would have permitted the entire alphabet to make the trip. This is where the genius part comes in. It turns out that Bell wanted to reserve 0 and 1 for special "flag" functions when used in the first couple of positions in the dialing sequence. 0, of course, is used to signal the operator. An initial 1 nowadays indicates a long distance number and is also used in shorthand numbers as 411 (directory assistance), 611 (phone repair), 911 (emergency dispatch), and 011 (international long-distance access). Until a few years ago, the second digit of every area code was either a 0 or a 1, another cue for the switching computers. (Starting all long distance numbers with 1 eliminated the need for this practice and made it possible to create many more area codes, but that's a topic for another day.) Assigning letters to the number 1 would have meant that it occasionally would be used as one of the first two digits of an ordinary local call, which would have fouled up the routing system.

Is that farsighted or what? I mean, who knew from area codes in 1925? Anyway, that's why high school pranksters can tell people they'll win a thousand dollars if they call QUincy 5-2000.

Phonetic telephone numbers became feasible in some cities a few years ago when local phone companies began replacing their old electromechanical switching equipment with computer-controlled electronic toys, which simultaneously made possible such modern conveniences as call forwarding and three-way calling. "Feasible," though, is not the same thing as "easy." There are two conditions here, plus a catch. The conditions are, first of all, that the first three letters of the desired number must designate an existing exchange within your area code, and second, that the number cannot already have been assigned to another subscriber. If Sue Ryan, resident of area 312, wanted S-U-E-R-Y-A-N (783-7926), for instance, you'd find that there is a 783 exchange on the south side of Chicago, but that 7926 is already assigned. You can try to work out a trade with the present assignee if you want, but the phone company will take no part in such negotiations. If the desired number is available, it's yours at no charge, whether you're a business or not (in Illinois, anyway). The catch is that you have to pay "trunk mileage" charges to have incoming calls transferred from the remote exchange (i.e, 783) to the exchange that serves your telephone (that's where the electronic switchgear comes in). The charges, as one might suppose, vary with distance.

A theory we have often heard is that the phone company intentionally reversed the calculator configuration so that people who were already fast at operating calculators would slow down enough to allow the signals of the phone to register. It's a neat theory, but it isn't true. Even today, fast punchers can render a touch-tone phone worthless.

Both the touch-tone key pad and the all-transistor calculator were made available to the general public in the early 1960s. Calculators were arranged from the beginning so that the lowest digits were on bottom. Telephone keypads put the 1-2-3 on the top row. Both configurations descended directly from earlier prototypes.

Before 1964, calculators were either mechanical or electronic devices with heavy tubes. The key pads on the first calculators actually resembled old cash registers, with the left row of keys numbering 9 on top down to 0 on the bottom. The next row to the right had 90 on top and 10 on the bottom, the next row to the right had 900 on top, 100 on the bottom, and so on. All of the early calculators were ten rows high, and most were nine rows wide. From the beginning, hand-held calculators placed 7-8-9 on the top row, from left to right.

Before the touch-tone phone, of course, rotary dials were the rule. There is no doubt that the touch-tone key pad was designed to mimic the rotary dial with the "1" on top and the 7-8-9 on the bottom. According to Bob Ford, of AT&T's Bell Laboratories, a second reason was that some phone-company research concluded that this configuration helped eliminate dialing errors. Ford related the story, which may or may not be apocryphal, that when AT&T contemplated the design of their key pad, they called several calculator companies, hoping they would share the research that led them to the opposite configuration. Much to their chargin, AT&T discovered that the calculator companies had conducted no research at all. From our contacts with Sharp and Texas Instruments, two pioneers in the calculator field, it seems that this story could easily be true.

It has also been suggested that if the lower numbers were on the bottom, the alphabet would then start on the bottom and be in reverse alphabetical order, a confusing setup. This might have entered AT&T's thinking, particularly in the "old days" when phone numbers contained only five digits, along with two exchange letters.

Feldman, David (1987),Why do clocks run clockwise?, New York: Harper & Row.