A short history of telephone numbers
§ 91. A short history of telephone numbers
June 18, 2002
The Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell is credited with speaking the first words by telephone on March 10, 1876: “Mr. Watson —Come here—I want to see you”. To call his assistant sitting next door, Bell didn’t have to dial a number: there were only two phone sets in the world at that time.
How they did it
Americans who were to encounter the problem of 7-digit numbers sooner that any other nation, found a mnemonic solution to the problem (it was generally believed back then that 7-digit numbers were hard to memorize): the first three digits were replaced with letters some word started with. For technical reasons no telephone number in the US started with "1". For historical reasons "zero" was always used to call the operator. As a result, any American telephone number could start with any figure but "1" and "0".