The Letter and Number System
by Ned Lambert
I'm pretty much of a phone number fan myself, and have found a few errors in your summation of the Bell System history. First, the old three letter-four number system existed as early as dial systems were installed (i.e. 1920). Not post WW II. There were only four areas that existed in North America. New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia. New York phased out 3L-4N in favor of 2L-5N (two letter, five number) as early as 1930 or so. Chicago and Philadelphia were last to change to 2L-5N in the late 1940's. Second, the prefix names in the larger cities usually represented areas of town (such as Gramercy was named for Gramercy Square in NY). The prefix Gramercy plus four numbers was the manual operation in use in the early 1900's. Since Bell had all of the major cities in the US and Canada which used names long before the independents were even in existence, how could they borrow the idea from them? People got used to these exchange names over the 60 year use of them. The Bell system changed to ANC for most of N.America in the 60's and it was only in very rare cases where you saw them as late as 1985.
Back in 1957, when I was 12 years old, I was absolutely fascinated by my city (Dayton,OH) changing over from the old 2L-4N (two letter, four number) system to the new 2L-5N system. Over 350,000 subscribers went to sleep on Nov.16th with the old system and awoke Sunday morning with the new one. My RAndolph had suddenly become CRestview 4. The conversion chart was on the back page of the new directory which I copied down and this became the humble beginning of my 50 year old hobby.
I found that the public library had many Ohio directories and at least every state capital in the US plus other larger cities and some foreign directories. Everywhere I went I always had a notebook and pen to jot down the phone prefixes. I even wrote to the telephone companies to get more details about their prefixes. For many years I thought I was the only person on the planet who was interested in stuff like this. Then I bought a computer and found that there were websites dedicated to people with similar hobbies. One such site was The EXchange Name Project to which I personally donated around 10,000 exchange names or prefix names and their respective cities from not only the US and Canada, but also the UK, France, Denmark,(all of which had names) plus Cuba, Hong Kong, and the USSR (which only used letters with no names related to the letters).
The rest of the world also became my target such as recent major conversions in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Bolivia, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, Ireland, additional 7-digit areas in the UK and so on. Of course, these places always had only numbers in their systems, but it was perhaps the fact that they were making major changes that North America had made long ago. My one regret is that there is really nowhere to go on the web to look up history (i.e. old telephone numbers with named prefixes) for some of the ones I don't have. Some itty-bitty towns such as Antler, ND where all I have is "CO7" for example. I specifically put this and others on the TENP website so that maybe somebody in North Dakota would write a comment like "Oh yeah, my grandma's number was..." Unfortunately, they must have other hobbies up there!
In summation, before I bore you to death, I realize that eventually all-number calling was the way to go, but as I recall the Ma Bell of olden days was a kinder, gentler Ma Bell who was worried that the loss of the old named prefixes would be a larger problem than it actually was. The plan for Dayton's change to all numbers was begun in 1961 and was supposed to have been completed by the new directory in 1965, but there was little opposition in Ohio, so by the time 1963 rolled around there were no mixed (letters and all-numbers) listings left. I read where this was not so easy in other areas such as Los Angeles where large groups of anti ANC people took the telephone company to court over the loss of the letters.