Today in 1963, a milestone in the history of phones: AT&T launched the first commercial telephone service where customers could use touch-tone devices instead of rotary dial.
It started with just two communities in western Pennsylvania, but of course it spread, way way beyond that.
Traditional landline telephones are more or less microphones and speakers connected with wire.
Rather than connect every phone to every other phone directly, phone companies connected most of the phones to exchanges, and then routed calls between specific lines.
Originally this had to be done by operators; you’d call up your local exchange and ask for a connection to whoever you were trying to call, and the operator would physically connect your line to the other line on the switchboard.
In 1919, AT&T started switching over to a system where customers could dial their own calls, spinning rotary dials on their phones to reach out to specific numbers.
It was faster than going through an operator, but that didn’t mean it was fast.
You’d have to spin a heavy dial on the face of the phone to choose a number.
The higher the digit, the more you’d have to crank that dial around.
So, even as work continued to move phone exchanges off of operators and onto rotary dial, Bell Laboratories and Western Electric worked up a system that didn’t require any rotaries.
Touch-tone phones had 10 (later 12) buttons on the front; pushing any one of them would generate a set of two tones that the phone network would connect to a specific digit or a symbol.
Once you pushed all the buttons for your number, the phone system would automatically start connecting your call.
This was a big breakthrough, because it meant that phones could be more interactive than ever (“for prescription refills, press one; for radiology, press two”).
It was also a small breakthrough; AT&T estimated touch-tone dialing was 50 to 80 percent faster than rotary, and because dialing a number on rotary took 10 seconds on average, so callers were saving like five seconds.
And it was a breakthrough that happened over time.
Just as it took time to switch everybody over to rotary service, it took about two decades to get all the phone exchanges off rotary and onto touch tones.
And that’s assuming people switched out their rotary phones, which not quite everybody did.
There are still a few out there. You could call us on one of them right now if you wanted.
Last week, Fran Dias Rufino and her husband had just returned to their home in southern Australia when they spotted an unexpected guest: there was a koala sitting on their floor, staring at them and then hopping up on their bed.
They did the obvious thing, they guided the koala back outside with help from a sweater.
50 years ago, touch-tone phones began a communication revolution (TribLive)
‘Only in Australia’: Couple comes home to find koala in bed (CNN)
