Shang Ning’s Blog

Superfluous element on the telephone


This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007.



Look at this picture, here is a superfluous element on the telephone - the Alphabet on each buttons. I know it is writting message in handphone, but I don’t know why it also be printed on the telephone, telephone cannot send message in China.

Then, I asked a few friends, no one knows the answer, at least, it is no functions in China.

This design in other countries will use?

One Response to “Superfluous element on the telephone”

Edward Vielmetti
February 19th, 2008 at 11:41 am

In the USA, telephone exchanges used to have names, not numbers.

In my home town the phone numbers (late 1960s, early 1970s) were things like CANAL-5-0487 or HUDSON-5-5328. The first two letters of the exchange were the direct dial number on the phones, e.g. 225-0487. At that time we didn’t have to dial the exchange for local calls, so we could dial everyone local with 5 digits.

http://ourwebhome.com/TENP/TENproject.html has a history of those exchanges.

Still in the US these letters are used in telephone answering systems to “dial by name”, if you have a company directory that needs to look someone up by their first or last name.

Of course the original phones that did this were rotary phones, not touch tone phones - here’s some samples:

http://www.peterme.com/archives/000275.html

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