Original North American Area Codes
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The original North American area codes were established by the
American Telephone & Telegraph Company AT&T Corporation, originally the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is the subsidiary of AT&T Inc. that provides voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to businesses, consumers, and government agen ...
(AT&T) in 1947, following the demonstration of regional
Operator Toll Dialing Operator Toll Dialing was a telephone call routing and toll-switching system for the Bell System and the independent telephone companies in the United States and Canada that was developed in the 1940s. It automated the switching and billing of lo ...
during the World War II period. The program had the goal of speeding the connecting times for
long-distance calling In telecommunications, a long-distance call (U.S.) or trunk call (also known as a toll call in the U.K. ) is a telephone call made to a location outside a defined local calling area. Long-distance calls are typically charged a higher billing rate ...
by eliminating intermediary telephone operators. Expanding this technology for national use required a comprehensive and universal, continent-wide
telephone numbering plan A telephone numbering plan is a type of numbering scheme used in telecommunication to assign telephone number A telephone number is a sequence of digits assigned to a landline telephone subscriber station connected to a telephone line or ...
. The new numbering plan established a uniform destination addressing and call routing system for all telephone networks in North America which had become an essential public service. It had the eventual benefit of
direct distance dialing Direct distance dialing (DDD) is a telecommunication service feature in North America by which a caller may, without operator assistance, call any other user outside the local calling area. Direct dialing by subscribers typically requires extra d ...
(DDD) by telephone subscribers. The initial ''Nationwide Numbering Plan'' of 1947 established eighty-six numbering plan areas (NPAs) that principally followed existing U.S. state and Canadian provincial boundaries, but fifteen states and provinces were subdivided further. Forty NPAs were mapped to entire states or provinces. Each NPA was identified by a three-digit ''area code'' used as a prefix to each local telephone number. The United States received seventy-seven area codes, and Canada nine. The initial system of numbering plan areas and area codes was expanded rapidly in the following decades, and established the
North American Numbering Plan The North American Numbering Plan (NANP) is a telephone numbering plan for twenty-five regions in twenty countries, primarily in North America and the Caribbean. This group is historically known as World Zone 1 and has the international callin ...
(NANP).


History

Early in the 20th century, the American and Canadian telephone industry had established criteria and circuits for sending telephone calls across the vast number of local telephone networks on the continent to permit users to call others in many remote places in both countries. By 1930, this resulted in the establishment of the
General Toll Switching Plan The General Toll Switching Plan was a systematic nationwide effort by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) of organizing the telephone toll circuits and cable routes of the nation, and of streamlining the operating principles and tec ...
, a systematic approach with technical specifications, for routing calls between two major classes of routing centers, ''Regional Centers'' and ''Primary Outlets'',H. S. Osborne,
A General Switching Plan for Telephone Toll Service
', Bell System Technical Journal Vol 9 (3) p.429 (1930)
as well as thousands of minor interchange points and tributaries. Calls were manually forwarded between centers by long-distance operators who used the method of
ringdown In telephony, ringdown is a method of signaling an operator in which telephone ringing current is sent over the line to operate a lamp or cause the operation of a self-locking relay known as a ''drop''. Ringdown is used in manual operation, a ...
to command remote operators to accept calls on behalf of customers. This required long call set-up times with several intermediate operators involved. When placing a call, the originating party would typically have to hang up and be called back by an operator once the call was established. The introduction of the first Western Electric No. 4 Crossbar Switching System in Philadelphia to commercial service, in August 1943, automated the process of forwarding telephone calls between regional switching centers. For the Bell System this was the first step to let their long-distance operators dial calls directly to potentially far-away telephones. While automatic switching decreased the connection times from up to fifteen minutes to approximately two minutes for calls between far-away locations, each intermediate operator still had to determine special routing codes unique to their location for each call. To make a nationwide dialing network an efficient, practical reality, a uniform nationwide numbering plan was needed so that each telephone on the continent had a unique address that could be used independently from where a call originated. Such methodology is called destination routing. With this goal,
AT&T AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile tel ...
developed a new framework in the early 1940s, called ''Operator Toll Dialing'', which was marked by the first installation of a newly developed toll switching system in Philadelphia in 1943. The effort proceeded in 1945 with periodical communications to the general telecommunication industry via the ''Dial Interexchange Committee'' of the ''United States Independent Telephone Association'' (''USITA''), which disseminated the project's progress to its members via industry journals and conference contributions. The planning transitioned to implementation, when Ralph Mabbs presented the results in a talk at the Fiftieth Anniversary Meeting of the Independent Telephone Association, on October 14, 1947. A fundamental requirement for the success of automated toll dialing was a new telephone numbering plan, which became known as the ''Nationwide Numbering Plan''. This numbering plan initially accounted for seventy-seven area codes in the United States and nine in Canada. With the buildout in technical infrastructure for automated toll dialing, the allocations needed to be changed in many states, adding numerous additional area codes over the following decade. By 1975, the numbering plan was known as the ''North American Numbering Plan'', as efforts were in progress to expand the system beyond the United States and Canada.


Numbering plan requirements

Building a nationwide network in which any telephone could be dialed directly required a systematic numbering system that was easy to understand and communicate. Local telephone numbers varied greatly across the country, from two or three digits in small communities, to seven in the large cities. By the time the Bell Laboratory engineers reached out in this effort to involve the broader industry bodies in 1945, clear concepts had been developed for Operator Toll Dialing. A crucial requirement was the conversion of all participating telephone networks to a universal numbering plan. In 1947, Ralph Mabbs recalled the specifications for this numbering plan as follows: *A distinctive telephone number for each telephone in the United States and Canada *The minimum number of digits which will provide for growth and new services *Minimum changes in customers' numbers *Minimum changes in local dialing practice *Least cost for equipment changes *Minimum reference by operators to bulletins and route guides to gain speed of service advantages *Provisions for operators to directly reach other operators at distant toll centers Based on the precedent and experience with the large-city dial systems in the nation, the designers set out to direct all telephone companies in the nation to standardize the local telephone networks in the nation to seven-digit local telephone numbers before they could participate in Operator Toll Dialing. This required no or only a few changes in the nation's largest cities, but in the smaller communities the shorter telephone numbers had to be padded with additional digits in a transparent, easily understandable manner, so that extra digits were not always needed when dialing other local subscribers. By 1955, AT&T disseminated a formal publication of network documentation, specifications, and recommendations to the telephone industry, entitled
Notes on Nationwide Dialing ''Notes on the Network'' is a publication of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) that outlines the state, technology, and operating principles of the public switched telephone network in the United States and Canada, and the other m ...
.


Central office prefixes

Most automatic dial switching systems were designed since the early 1920s to provide service for up to ten-thousand subscriber lines. Each of these switching system constituted a local
telephone exchange A telephone exchange, telephone switch, or central office is a telecommunications system used in the public switched telephone network (PSTN) or in large enterprises. It interconnects telephone subscriber lines or virtual circuits of digital syst ...
, formally known as a ''central office''. Therefore, each telephone connected to a central office had a unique four-digit line or station number. In larger communities that required multiple central offices to account for the service need of their population, extra digits were added to the telephone number, preceding the line number. Such extra digits were dialed when calling a telephone connected to another switching system in the same city or in a nearby community, and served as routing codes to those central offices. Central office prefixes had already been used in the cities' dial systems since the 1920s, and were typically dialed by subscribers as the initial letters of the exchange name, but only the largest of cities used three digits or letters. This practice and familiarity was preserved in the initial formulation of the new numbering plan, but was standardized to a format of using two letters and one digit in the prefix, resulting in the format ''2L–5N'' (two letters and five numerals) for the subscriber telephone number. For most cities, this conversion required the addition of extra digits or letters to the existing central office prefix. For example, the Atlantic City, New Jersey, telephone number ''4-5876'' was converted to ''AT4-5876'' in the 1950s. Complete replacement of existing prefixes was necessary in the case of conflicts with another office in the state. Duplication of central office names, or an identical mapping of two different names to digits, was not uncommon. In practice, the conversion of the nation to this numbering plan took decades to accomplish and was not complete before the
alphanumeric Alphanumericals or alphanumeric characters are a combination of alphabetical and numerical characters. More specifically, they are the collection of Latin letters and Arabic digits. An alphanumeric code is an identifier made of alphanumeric ch ...
number format was abandoned in the 1960s in favor of all-number calling (ANC). In addition to the central offices that provided the subscriber lines for each telephone (''wire centers''), the toll routing system included special switching centers that routed long-distance call between end offices. Each of these toll centers also received an assignment of a unique three-digit toll office code. To reach another operator in another central office or toll office, an operator dialed only the office code of the destination.


Numbering plan areas

By 1945, initial concepts for a nationwide numbering plan anticipated a division of the continent into between fifty and seventy-five numbering plan areas. For this size of the network, a unique two-digit code for each numbering plan area (NPA) would have been sufficient. However, AT&T wanted to preserve existing dialing practices by only dialing the local number for local calls; it was therefore necessary to distinguish the NPA codes from central office codes automatically by the switching system. Central office codes already could not have the digits ''0'' and ''1'' in either of the first two positions, because no letters were mapped to those to represent
exchange names A telephone exchange name or central office name was a distinguishing and memorable name assigned to a central office. It identified the switching system to which a telephone was connected, and facilitated the connection of telephone calls betwee ...
. This was the opportunity for distinction, but only when ''0'' or ''1'' were used in the second position, because switching systems already suppressed single loop interruption (corresponding to ''1'') automatically, and ''0'' was used to reach an operator or long-distance desk. Therefore, numbering plan area codes, often called just ''area codes'', were defined to have three digits, with the middle digit being ''0'' or ''1''. Area codes with the middle digit ''0'' were assigned to numbering plan areas that comprised an entire state or province, while jurisdictions with multiple numbering plan areas received area codes having ''1'' as the second digit. The geographic layout of numbering plan areas across the North American continent was chosen primarily according to national, state, and territorial boundaries in Canada and the United States. While originally considered, no numbering plan area in the United States included more than a single state, but in Canada NPA 902 comprised all three provinces of
The Maritimes The Maritimes, also called the Maritime provinces, is a region of Eastern Canada consisting of three provinces: New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island. The Maritimes had a population of 1,899,324 in 2021, which makes up 5.1% of Ca ...
in the far east. The largest states, and some states with suitable call routing infrastructure were divided into smaller entities, resulting in fifteen states and provinces that were subdivided further, creating 46 NPAs. Forty NPAs were assigned to entire states or provinces. The original configuration of the North American Numbering Plan assigned eighty-six area codes in October 1947, one each to every numbering plan area. The
territories of the United States Territories of the United States are sub-national administrative divisions overseen by the federal government of the United States. The various American territories differ from the U.S. states and Indian reservation, tribal reservations as ...
, which included
Alaska Alaska ( ; russian: Аляска, Alyaska; ale, Alax̂sxax̂; ; ems, Alas'kaaq; Yup'ik: ''Alaskaq''; tli, Anáaski) is a state located in the Western United States on the northwest extremity of North America. A semi-exclave of the U.S., ...
, and Hawaii, did not receive area codes at first.


Assignment plan

The number of central offices that could be effectively installed in a numbering plan with two letters and one digit for the central office code was expected to be approximately five-hundred, because acceptable names for central offices had to be selected carefully to avoid miscommunication. States or provinces that required this many offices had to be divided into multiple smaller areas. Next to size, another important aspect was the existing infrastructure for call routing, which had developed in preceding decades independently of state or municipal boundaries. Since traffic between numbering plan areas would require special Class-4 toll switching systems, planning the divisions avoided cutting busy toll traffic routes, so that most toll traffic remained within an area, and outgoing traffic from one area would not be tributary to toll offices in an adjacent area.W.H. Nunn,
Nationwide Numbering Plan
', Bell System Technical Journal 31(5), 851 (1952)
On the other hand, it was already recognized in 1930 that too little granularity in the allocation pattern introduced expensive traffic back-haul requirements, conceivably resulting in congestion of the routes to the centers. Consideration of several assignment patterns led to the configuration that was publicized as a map in October 1947. The three-digit codes were assigned to numbering plan areas in seemingly random manner, avoiding consecutive, nearly-consecutive, or just very similar codes in neighboring numbering plan areas to avoid customer confusion, even when located in the same jurisdiction. This criterion was not always achieved, however. A 'sweeping' enumeration method had been examined earlier, but was discarded. Thus, it would not have been possible to locate the approximate geographic location of a numbering plan area by its code alone. The plan divided New York into five areas, the most of any state.
Illinois Illinois ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern United States. Its largest metropolitan areas include the Chicago metropolitan area, and the Metro East section, of Greater St. Louis. Other smaller metropolita ...
,
Ohio Ohio () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States. Of the fifty U.S. states, it is the 34th-largest by area, and with a population of nearly 11.8 million, is the seventh-most populous and tenth-most densely populated. The sta ...
,
Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
, and
Texas Texas (, ; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Texas'', ''Tejas'') is a state in the South Central United States, South Central region of the United States. At 268,596 square miles (695,662 km2), and with more than 29.1 million residents in 2 ...
were assigned four area codes each, and California,
Iowa Iowa () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States, bordered by the Mississippi River to the east and the Missouri River and Big Sioux River to the west. It is bordered by six states: Wisconsin to the northeast, Illinois to the ...
, and
Michigan Michigan () is a state in the Great Lakes region of the upper Midwestern United States. With a population of nearly 10.12 million and an area of nearly , Michigan is the 10th-largest state by population, the 11th-largest by area, and the ...
received three. Eight states and provinces were split into two NPAs. The pattern of this assignment of area codes is shown in the following tabulation. This method of arrangement, which is known to have been in use at Bell Laboratories, shows clearly that area codes were assigned not entirely in random order, but by filling the table in diagonal manner from the top left corner, containing the low-numbered area codes, toward the center and lower right corner. Such a pattern suggests that the designers intended to maintain the same degree of randomness in digits for the remaining, yet unassigned codes. The first area code (201) was given to the entire state of New Jersey, the state with the highest population density in the nation. Despite its density, the state was not subdivided until about a decade later. In fact, in the group of single-NPA states, having the middle digit ''0'', all of the low-number codes were assigned to the mid-Atlantic states around New Jersey, i.e. the District of Columbia, Connecticut, Maryland, Delaware, and Rhode Island, all states in the top of the list of states with the highest population densities. In this table, the assignments of the nine area codes to the Canadian provinces are highlighted by a blue background. The red fields are the NPAs that hosted the Regional Centers for toll-switching established in the General Toll Switching Plan of 1929: New York City (212), Los Angeles (213), Dallas (214), Chicago (312), St. Louis (314), and San Francisco (415) in the multi-NPA states, and in Denver (303) and Atlanta (404) in states with just a single area code each. These NPAs are clearly clustered in the upper left corner, especially in the multiple-NPA table, but area codes 303 and 404 also fit neatly into the corresponding white positions of the N1X table (not Regional Centers), so that the Regional Center formed an almost closed block when ignoring the middle digit. These existing centers were supplemented by new centers (in orange fields) in Detroit (313), already serving the busy toll route to Toronto, and in Philadelphia (215), which had been chosen for the first cut-over into commercial service of a No. 4 Crossbar toll switch in 1943. The codes of the forms ''N00'', ''N10'', and ''N11'', where N is ''2'' through ''9'', were not available for assignment as area codes at the time, but were reserved as special codes, leaving a total of 136 possible combinations. The series ''N00'' was later used for non-geographic numbers, starting with intrastate toll-free 800 numbers for Inward
Wide Area Telephone Service Wide Area Telephone Service (WATS) was a flat-rate long-distance service offering for customer dial-type telecommunications in some of the countries that adhere to the North American Numbering Plan. The service was between a given customer phone ( ...
(WATS) in 1965. ''N10'' numbers became teletypewriter exchanges,AT&T, ''Notes on the Network'' (1968), Section 9 and ''N11'' were used for special services, such as information and emergency services.


Implementation and expansion

For several years, area codes could only be used for
Operator Toll Dialing Operator Toll Dialing was a telephone call routing and toll-switching system for the Bell System and the independent telephone companies in the United States and Canada that was developed in the 1940s. It automated the switching and billing of lo ...
by long-distance operators on routes between toll offices equipped with trunk code translation equipment. This absent, operators still had to rely on route operators and office-specific trunk codes, or employ the previous method of ringdown forwarding between intermediate operators. For entering the destination codes and telephone numbers into newly designed machine-switching equipment, long-distance operators did not use the slow rotary dials, but a ten-button key set, operating at least twice as fast, which transmitted
multi-frequency In telephony, multi-frequency signaling (MF) is a type of signaling that was introduced by the Bell System after World War II. It uses a combination of audible tones for address (telephone number) transport and supervision signaling on trunk lines b ...
(MF) tone pulses over regular voice channels to the remote switching centers. Such channels were incapable of transmitting the direct-current pulses of a rotary dial beyond a single link. All existing toll switching offices, many still using direct-control (step-by-step) methods, had to be supplemented with components to permit MF signaling and automatic route selection. As the implementation of the new numbering plan commenced, and the planning, design, and manufacture of detailed routing infrastructure proceeded, several numbering plan areas were redrawn or added in following years. In 1948, northern Indiana received an extra area code (
219 __NOTOC__ Year 219 ( CCXIX) was a common year starting on Friday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Antonius and Sacerdos (or, less frequently, year 972 '' ...
) for its Chicago suburbs by splitting area code 317. In 1950, southwest Missouri, with a new toll-center in Joplin, received
area code 417 Area code 417 is a telephone area code in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) for the southwestern quadrant of Missouri, including the cities of Branson, Carl Junction, Carthage, Joplin, Lebanon, Neosho, Nixa, Ozark, Springfield, and ...
, a change that provided more central offices in Kansas City. In 1951, the number of area codes grew to ninety: the State of New York gained
area code 516 Area code 516 is a telephone area code of the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) in the U.S. state of New York. The numbering plan area (NPA) comprises the Nassau County portion of Long Island. History When the North American Numbering Plan w ...
on Long Island, and Southern California received
area code 714 Area codes 714 and 657 are telephone area codes covering northern Orange County, a portion of Los Angeles County, and the Sleepy Hollow and Carbon Canyon areas of Chino Hills in San Bernardino County in the U.S. state of California. Cities in th ...
, to reduce the numbering plan area of Los Angeles. In December 1948, AT&T advanced the new long-distance system with the cutover of new crossbar switching systems for toll-dialing in New York and Chicago, which added new technology to the No. 4 Crossbar Switching System, first installed in Philadelphia in 1943. This enabled operators to place calls directly to distant telephones without additional operators en route to some three-hundred cities, and resulted in the handling of about ten percent of all Bell System long-distance calling by Operator Toll Dialing. On average, it took about two minutes for any long-distance call to be completed to its destination. As foreseen and stated in 1949, the target goal for call completion, after full implementation of the system across the nation was one minute. By 1951, preparations had proceeded for customer trials of
direct distance dialing Direct distance dialing (DDD) is a telecommunication service feature in North America by which a caller may, without operator assistance, call any other user outside the local calling area. Direct dialing by subscribers typically requires extra d ...
(DDD) from a single location in the country,
Englewood, New Jersey Englewood is a city in Bergen County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey, which at the 2020 United States census had a population of 29,308. Englewood was incorporated as a city by an act of the New Jersey Legislature on March 17, 1899, from por ...
, which had received an installation of a No. 5 crossbar switch equipped to handle the dialing of up to eleven digits, had automatic message accounting for billing, and was linked to a toll-class switch with the first commercial
transistor upright=1.4, gate (G), body (B), source (S) and drain (D) terminals. The gate is separated from the body by an insulating layer (pink). A transistor is a semiconductor device used to Electronic amplifier, amplify or electronic switch, switch e ...
circuitry that enabled the system to automatically translate area codes into toll trunk codes.P. Mallery, ''Transistors and Their Circuits in the 4A Toll Crossbar Switching System'', AIEE Transactions, September 1953, p.388 From the customer dialing experience in the Englewood DDD trials, the Bell Laboratories engineers gained the confidence to predict that customers would use the new numbering plan with a ''reasonable degree of convenience and accuracy.'' After the success of these trials, expansion of the numbering plan accelerated with new crossbar systems and four new area codes in 1953, and seven in 1954. By the end of the decade thirty-one additional area codes had been created over the initial allotment of 1947. to satisfy the post-war surge in demand for telephone service. While the first customer-dialed call using an area code was made on November 10, 1951, it took nearly fifteen years after the 1947 announcement of the new numbering plan that direct distance dialing was common in most cities. By then, some of the initial criteria for assignment, such as the 0/1 rule for single/multiple NPA assignments in a given state had to be abandoned by new requirements from population shifts and growth of communication services. In 1960, AT&T engineers, estimating that the capacity of the numbering plan would be exhausted by 1975, prepared for the next major step in the evolution of the network by eliminating central office names, and introducing all-number calling (ANC). ANC, once supplemented by
interchangeable central office code In the North American Numbering Plan (NANP), interchangeable NPA and central office codes constituted a change in numbering plan design and policy, to mitigate exhaustion of the numbering resources of the ten-digit telephone numbers used in the clo ...
s in the 1970s, increased the number of central office prefixes possible in each numbering plan area from 540 to an eventual maximum of 792.


See also

*
List of future North American area codes This is a list of future area codes in the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) in the planning stages for relief of central office code exhaustion in the given numbering plan areas (NPAs). The dates are subject to change during implementation as p ...
*
List of North American Numbering Plan area codes The North American Numbering Plan (NANP) divides the territories of its members into geographic numbering plan areas (NPAs). Each NPA is identified by one or more numbering plan area codes (''NPA codes'', or ''area codes''), consisting of three di ...


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Original NANP area codes * Telephone numbers in the United States Telephone numbers in Canada Area codes in the United States Area codes in Canada Telecommunications-related introductions in 1947 Telephony