

Initially, every area code installed had a second digit that was either a 0 or a 1. The real tell, in this sense, wasn’t the first number in the three-digit area code it was the second. As shown by this map, Bell appears to have based its initial decision-making on area codes on a combination of population and future need. That’s because the real factor here wasn’t geography, but population need. In comparison, area codes within the North American Numbering Plan don’t break down quite so neatly geographically.
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ZIP Code system get higher the further west you go. Likewise, the first three digits in the U.S. Interstate system, which has odd numbers going north and south, even numbers going east and west, and highway numbers that grow higher in value as you go further east or north, has a clear logic to it, even if it sometimes veers from this logic.

And that’s the part, from the outside, that doesn’t seem so clear-especially compared to other large, national apparatuses.
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Requiring human interaction just to dial a number from a certain distance away created artificial limits on how big the system could become.īut the question, of course, is how to organize that system. The truth, of course, was that the goal was to remove operators from the equation entirely-because there would never be enough human operators to fill the inevitable need. “In a few years long distance operators will be dialing calls, directly and unassisted, straight through to telephones as far away as the other side of the continent,” exclaimed a 1945 statement from Northwestern Bell published in the Minneapolis Morning Trbune. Initially, this was sold as a boon for operators. The phone company wanted to make it possible for anyone to call anyone, anywhere, in an automated way. The Numbering Plan Area, which Bell put into place starting in the 1940s, was designed to replace a far-more-complicated system that relied on operators to manually move calls through the system. To understand the reasoning for the current telephone area codes, it’s worth keeping in mind two things: The way that population levels differ from state to state, and the basic design of the early system. (StockSnap/Pixabay) The logic behind the area code, at least at first These phones, oddly, inspired the structure of area codes.
