THE DIGIT DISEASE
How Measles Led to Phone Numbers
It’s your unique identification number. Ten to fifteen digits you regularly give to other people without much of a second thought, even those you’ve just met and, in some cases, have never spoken to before. It’s your phone number!
Phone numbers have been around since 1880 and are an integral part of the modern communication infrastructure. But when phone networks were originally developed, there wasn’t an immediate need for phone numbers. You’d simply pick up the receiver and be connected with an operator who would connect you to any person or business you needed to contact. And because calls in those days were local and the operators were local too, callers were usually connected correctly and quickly.
Telephone numbers probably didn’t even cross the minds of those in charge of phone companies in those days. One of the first-ever phone books, for example, didn’t use numbers at all; published in New Haven, Connecticut, it simply listed the handful of businesses in the area that had phones. The entire “book” fit on one single page; why bother developing a numbering system to accommodate fewer than one hundred customers?
However, in 1879, something happened in Lowell, Massachusetts, that changed phone history forever. In this year, Lowell found itself home to two things: a new telephone switchboard and a measles epidemic. Now the idea that the measles would have any effect on telephone operations seems strange, but in the time of manual switchboards and no vaccinations for disease, the measles put the entire system at risk.
The Lowell system was staffed by four people, and each ran the risk of contracting the disease. If the Lowell switchboard lost its operators, how would they connect calls? Backup switchboard operators were an option, but they didn’t know the switchboard as well as the regular employees, so calls might not have been connected as quickly or accurately.
A physician named Moses Greeley Parker came up with the solution. The phone company would assign a unique ID number to each of its customers (roughly two hundred total), corresponding with each customer’s location on the internal switchboard. Now when a caller rang the operator, he or she would provide the ID number of the party the caller was trying to reach. The switchboard operator would have no trouble finding that number on the board in front of him or her, even if he or she had no previous experience as an operator for that community.
Surprisingly, Dr. Parker’s suggestion wasn’t well received at first. Many customers objected to being reduced to an arbitrary set of digits. According to Ammon Shea, author of The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads, many customers expressed that they “would sooner give up their telephones entirely rather than submit themselves to the dehumanizing indignity of being identified by a number.” But reason eventually prevailed: When it came to preventing the measles from stopping phone service, Dr. Parker’s solution was the best bet the town had. The phone company adopted his solution, and Lowell, Massachusetts, became the first town in the United States with phone numbers.