A Nation At Our Fingertips
I work in off-campus student housing. That being said, I get to see a lot of people from a lot of different places. And I’ve started a game with myself — trying to guess where they are from based only on the area code of their phone number. Tuesday, I was sitting at my desk when an email came through, a young man interested in housing. His area code? 585. That’s a new one. So I hopped online to the trusted Google and typed in ‘585 area code’. It is the area in and around Rochester, New York.
That got me thinking, area codes are a mandatory necessity in our lives, and we strongly identify with our area codes, but what started this whole process? It turns out that by the 1940’s telephones had become so popular that there weren’t enough people able to work the switchboards. So the folks down at The Bell Telephone Company decided they were going to create a way for their customers to place calls simply by dialing a set of numbers and letters on their phones without the need to speak with an operator. This became known as Direct Distance Dialing, or what we call dialing.
They devised a three-digit system of identification for groups of populations. It all started with area code 201 out of Englewood, NJ. The creators of this system at Bell Labs, located near Englewood, rolled out this new numbering system in the same way we do things now — Beta Testing!! Residents of Englewood were the only people with given use of the new system. After a few years of use of area codes in Englewood, the researchers decided it was time to roll it out to the whole country! And in 1951 Englewood Mayor M. Leslie Denning dialed a number: 415-LA-3–9727. And not even 20 seconds later, the call was picked up by Frank Osborn, the mayor of Alameda, California. The country declared this cross-continental conversation a historic landmark in communications.
With that call, the United States had moved further into the automated system it was beginning to love. This system of area codes was named the North American Numbering Plan. This plan released 86 area codes for cities and states around the country and Canada.
But, the researchers at Bell Labs knew that the country would grow, and phone use would grow so they made their plan able to work into the future. To do this they created 152 different area codes, but only initially released those first 86. And they were right by the 1960’s the division of area codes is already beginning to look like the divisions we are familiar with today.
But why do the numbers seem to be so random? Well, initial there was a method to their madness. Larger cities that had more people and were considered more important got area codes with smaller numbers. This made dialing on the rotary phone much easier as the smaller numbers didn’t have to rotate as far. For example, New York City has the area code 212, one of the simplest area codes to dial at the time because it was a big and important city. And Los Angeles was given 312, equally as simple to dial because it is equally as big and important. But that wasn’t their only trick. The creators of this plan tried to keep area codes that are similar in numbers far apart from each other. The best example of this being the area code 305 in Florida and 503 in Washington. Far apart so no one would accidentally call the wrong person.
Today though, there are somewhere between 256 and 293 area codes in use. That being said, the original plan to give big cities simple numbers and keep similar codes far apart just isn’t able to happen anymore. When one area code gets too many numbers assigned to it, like they literally run out of numbers for people, a new code must be assigned to that area so they have more numbers to hand out. Take St. Louis for example. Area code 314 used to encompass most of East Missouri. But as the population in St. Louis grew, new codes were needed for the area. 314 is now condensed into inner St. Louis, 636 is the surrounding suburbs, and 573 is central, east, southeast Missouri.
I would say my cyberflaneur adventure ended with a lot of new information. But this idea of browsing the internet with no intended destination isn’t something new for me. I frequently will have a random question, google it, and end up learning everything about that topic after visiting a Wiki site, a news article, and a research website. Just yesterday I learned about Hurrican Eyewall Replacement — an unknown phenomenon. What I did learn from my cyberflaneur of area codes is that my guessing game of where people are from based on area code got a lot harder know now that there are almost 300 in use in the US alone.
