Adrianne: Hey everyone!

John: Hello Adrianne!

Billy: Hey!

Regina: Hi. 

Adrianne: We got an email from a listener with a question.

Billy: Yes, that’s my favorite thing.

Adrianne: This is George.

George: Hello?

Adrianne: How’s your day going so far?

George: I had a negative COVID test this morning, so I am honestly very, very happy. 

Adrianne: George sent us an email with the subject line, Nerdiest Question Ever? 

Billy: On this show?

Regina: It’s our kind of subject line.

Billy: Yeah. I doubted George, but go ahead.

George: So, ever since I was a kid, I was interested in numbers and systems and nerdy things like that. And growing up we all had an area code and never thought much about it. It seemed as though those numbers were just a random three digits.

Billy: Yeah. 

John: I guess we should probably clarify for our international listeners that what we’re talking about is in phone numbers in the US. 

Adrianne: Yes. Phone numbers in the U S.

John: There’s this- for a long time, it was thought of as like your phone number was seven digits. And before the seven digits, there was a three digit area code before them.

Billy: And none of them are actually 555 like our TV and movies would lead you to believe. 

Adrianne: Right. Good note. 

Billy: I was just saying, if I, you know, if I watched a lot of American movies and TV, I would think that everyone- 

John: Everyone-

Billy: 555. 

George: Seemed as though those numbers were just random three digits until you learn well, though, the middle one’s always a zero or a one, or at least it used to be.

Adrianne: Even up until the 90s, every area code had a zero or a one in the middle but, we just ended up with too many phone numbers. And now there is not really a consistent system like that anymore.

Billy: That tracks with my memory of old landline numbers before the pre cellphone era.

George: But they all seemed random and it never gave much thought to it until one day I came across a website that actually explained the somewhat interesting and sensible reasons why area codes have the numbers they do. 

Adrianne: What is this website?

George: It’s lincmad, lincmad.com. 

Adrianne: Okay. 

George: That’s this massive like, a lot of information about area codes and splits and all these different things about how the process works.

Adrianne: And how did you end up on lincmad.com?

George: I cannot- I cannot give you a good answer for that.

Adrianne: I feel like I can relate to this. 

Regina: What? 

Adrianne: Okay. Now, would you all go to lincmad.com? Lincmad.com? 

Billy: So linc like Lincoln.

Adrianne: Linc like Lincoln, mad like Madison. 

John: Ooohh. 

Regina: Oh, wow. It’s a good looking site.

Billy: I can’t wait to click one of these links and see it turned purple.

Regina: It turned orange.

John: I think the visitor’s counter is broken. Do I have to turn off my ad? 

Regina: No, it says right above that received over a million visits from 1997 until the counter broke. Oh, I see. So it was broken from 1997 until 2006. And now we’re at almost 4 million.

Billy: It says, telephone area codes and splits, which I assume the split is the middle part of the number.

Regina: Like the- 

John: No, I bet, I bet this means when an area code- when a geographic area for an area code splits into two.

Adrianne: John’s got it.

Billy: Oh.

Regina: Oh.

Adrianne: All right. Back to George.

George: In the old system before things changed, 0 meant that there was only one area code in a state. And a 1 meant that there were multiple area codes in the state. And so it was always a 0 or 1 in the middle.

Adrianne: This is not how it is anymore, but when it was first introduced, when area codes were first defined, the original rule was that States that had just one area code for the whole state would have a zero in the middle, and States that had more than one area code would have a one in the middle of all those area codes. 

So, Oregon is 503. All of Idaho is 702, but California which has three different area codes is 916, 415 and 213. 

George: But then from there the first and third digits corresponded in general to how densely populated an area was with the idea that rotary dial back in the 40s when these things were started, 2 took very little time where a 9 took a long time to dial.

Adrianne: Are you following along with this? The rotary telephone? 

Billy: Yes.

Adrianne: So a rotary phone, I never had one of these operationally. I think maybe my grandmother did but, it is that phone with the big circle on the front, with all of the numbers arranged in a circle and you stick your finger on the number and then you pull it to the right until it hits like a little stopper. And then you let it, you let the dial roll back to home to its resting state. And then you stick your finger in the next number in the phone number you’re trying to call it and you pull it all the way to the right, and then you let it roll back into place. 

And you continue like that until you’ve completed dialing the number and it takes forever, especially if the numbers on the phone number you’re calling are higher. Like if you were calling nine 9999999 it would just- it would take you literally forever.

George: So they felt it made sense to assign the lower digits to the more densely populated areas. So New York got 212, and LA got 213, and Chicago 312 from there. And then as things got less popular, they got higher numbers.

Adrianne: Just let me stop you for a second to clarify. The thinking is that the more populous areas you want those numbers to be easier to dial because more people will be dialing them. Is that right? 

George: I think so. That’s right. That’s my impression of it. Sure.

Adrianne: They didn’t want anyone to have to work too hard.

George: Well, it’s- 

Adrianne: Spinning that rotary dial.

George: A lot more people are going to be calling 212 than 812 and so might as well save a couple seconds here and there. 

And then I realized that Boston is 617, and that doesn’t make any sense. Why would Boston get stuck with 617?

Adrianne: Right. Those are relatively high digits.

George: That’s a lot of numbers. That’what? 13 pulls plus the one in the middle, right? That’s a lot of, that’s a lot of dialing, right? For a big big city like Boston. Why would they get stuck with 617? You know, Boston got screwed somehow.

Adrianne: So not only did Boston get high numbers, but another section of the state got low numbers.

George: Western Massachusetts which I mean has a couple of big cities, but compared to Boston, is not a very populated area has 413 which feels right for Boston, right? I mean, you’d have Philadelphia, I think it’s like 215, I think. I don’t know. But yeah, you’d think it feels like that should be Boston feels like those, those zones were switched for some reason.

Adrianne: Any theories?

George: Any theories? Well, there’s two possible reasons. Maybe there was some sort of a political thing. Maybe somebody in Boston likes the number 67. I don’t know. Maybe there’s- maybe 617 was too close to something similar. I don’t know.

Billy: So he said he doesn’t know if it was maybe a political thing, but was this even a political decision to begin with? Who is determining this? Was it the telecoms?

Adrianne: It was the telecom. Yeah.

Billy:  Right. 

Adrianne: It was AT&T came up with this system in the 1940s.

Billy: And so  AT&T isn’t asking local government officials what they want the number to be presumably that wouldn’t make sense.

Adrianne: Right, but maybe some  AT&T executive knows the mayor of Boston. They’re out for…beers.

John: It sounds like our caller, our emailer. Think this was based on population and the number of inbound calls coming to a city, right? So, on the whole you’re saving rotary spins to everyone in the system by making them most called places, the lowest numbers. Is it possible that Boston had a higher rate of people calling inside of Boston and therefore wouldn’t need to dial the area code?

Billy: Oh. Right. 

John: You follow what I’m saying? Like, is it possible that people from outside of Boston weren’t calling Boston very much, even though it was pretty populous?

Adrianne: Nobody was calling Boston.

Regina: Yeah. That seems pretty possible just knowing Boston.

Billy: Rude. Well. But. Okay. Speaking of people being rude to Boston, there’s another theory. So, you’re saying maybe it was some kind of favor to someone in Boston, like, “Oh, they like these numbers”. 

John: It could have been to screw them.

Billy: Right. Is this some kind of slate to Boston? Like screw Boston, let’s get my high numbers. So they really got to crank those rotary phones.

Adrianne: We’ll show them. 

So, what would satisfy you? What answers are you looking for?

George: I would simply like to know how it was decided that those area code zones or whatever got swapped. Why Boston got screwed with 617 and why Western Mass got the nicer 413?

Adrianne: Where I would like to start is with the owner of lincmad.com. His name is Linc Madison, could be short for Lincoln. Not sure. 

Billy: I was going to say his name is like two presidents.

Adrianne: I could see a parent going for that.

Regina: After the break, Adrianne gets connected to the network.

 John: Hey listeners! It’s John. The podcast you’re listening to Undersunderstood is produced completely independently by four of us in our spare time. And that’s possible because of listeners like you because you become patrons on Patreon. 

It’s really easy and supports the show. $5 a month gets you access to our private Discord server where you can hang out with other fans in the show. And, you get access to our weekly bonus podcast which we call, Overunderstood. It’s kind of a looser show. We talk about things that maybe weren’t exactly a fit to Undersunderstood but, we’d like to talk about any way it’s kind of looser. 

Sometimes, we talk about internet mysteries that actually weren’t solved. So, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about a mystery from 2014 about a Youtube channel called Webdriver Torso which was posting blibs and blobs to the internet, and for a period of 9 months, nobody knew what it meant.  If you want to hear about that and all kinds of strange ephemera from around the world, you can hear it on Overunderstood. 

We do that show even when the main show is in hiatus, and $5 a month on Patreon is what gets you access to it. 

So, if you want to sign up, go to patreon.com/underunderstood. And if you’re already a patreon, thank you so much. 

Adrianne: I’m back. 

Regina: Hey.

Billy: Hello!

John: So fast!

Adrianne: I have so much to tell you. I do want to flag one thing before we start, this is going to be what we like to affectionately call an “oops, all dudes episode”.

Billy: Oh, no. 

Adrianne: Literally, every person I will mention identifies as a man and there are 11 in total and they all have common anglo Protestant sounding names. 

So, just be ready to handle all that.

Billy: I’m just going to do my part by muting my mic in the entire session. 

John: Yeah. Yeah. I’ll be silent for the rest of this.

Adrianne: Yeah. Billy and John, you can just sit this one out. No, I’m kidding. We need you. 

So, first I talked to Lincoln Madison, the proprietor of lincmad.com. 

John: You got him. 

Adrianne: I got him. I got Linc.

John: Nice.

Linc: I’m Lincoln Madison, two presidents for the price of one.

Adrianne: How did you get into area codes?

Linc: Childhood obsession, actually. I was always very much fascinated by telephones. In fact, one of the family stories is that when I was about four years old, I took a part of the telephone while my mother was talking on it.

Adrianne: Did she not notice?

Linc: I don’t know. I don’t remember it directly myself, but I suspect that I probably just took the casing off of the workings. I don’t think I got much further than that.

I also would literally- when we were on a road trip, and in the motel room, I would pull the phone book out of the drawer and just go through it and look at the patterns of phone numbers.

Adrianne: So Linc is still very actively maintaining his website, which is where he tracks area code splits. That’s where an area code gets broken up into multiple areas codes, and overlays where new area codes are introduced on top of the same geographical area as an existing area code. 

He also started cataloging international area codes.

Linc: For example, in the African country, if Côte d’Ivoire formerly known as Ivory Coast, every single phone number in the country will change on January 31st.

Adrianne: So that happened January 31st, 2021. I talked to Linc before that. But Côte d’Ivoire added essentially two digits to the front of every number. This is sort of parallel to what happened with North America, adding three digit area codes to the front of every number.

If you remember Linc’s site is where George got his information about bigger cities being assigned numbers that were shorter to dial on a rotary phone. So I asked him about this anomaly with Boston and Western Massachusetts, where Boston, the big city, got the longer 614 and rural Western Mass, which had a much smaller population, got the shorter 413. 

Do you have any theories about how that might’ve happened?

Linc: I don’t know really. Although, if you look, it’s basically the same level as Buffalo and Rochester, which were 716. So, it wasn’t a horribly disadvantaged number but, it was lower down the list than you would have expected.

Adrianne: So, unfortunately Linc didn’t really know much beyond what was already on his website, so I tried to sort of move up the chain of custody and get to the primary source. Like how did Linc know this? About rotary dials and dial times? 

Do you recall where this tidbit about the rotary dial came from? Like how you found that out? 

Linc: Well, back when I was in grad school, in the 80s and 90s, there was a Usenet news group that’s already dating me a bit. But anyway, there was a news group that was talking about telecom issues in general, and quite a bit of the traffic was specifically about numbering.

Adrianne: Do you remember anything more specific about who said that on Usenet?

Linc: I don’t remember specifically, but by the time I was made aware of that it was common knowledge at least within the telephone numbering, obsessive community.

Adrianne: But your source for this information is?

Linc: It’s mostly apocryphal.

Adrianne: Yeah?

Linc: Honestly. 

Adrianne: Okay. So if there were another theory that would explain it, then you would- you’d be open to it?

Linc: Yes. 

Adrianne: This fact that big cities got shorter area codes that were easier to dial on a rotary phone, it’s popped up in a lot of places. It’s an Atlas Obscura. I found it in a blog post on 99% invisible. It was in an Atlantic story, but now I’m starting to wonder if all of these places are just getting their information from Linc and his sourcing actually seems like it might be a little shaky.

John: Uh…

Regina: Oh, no Linc didn’t have the link.

Adrianne: Is there anyone else you think I should talk to about this? About either area codes in general? Or the Boston-617 thing or the rotary dial thing?

Linc: Oh, gosh. Most of the people that I would point you to are sadly no longer with us. Or at least no longer have their websites. So I can’t think of any off the top of my head.

Adrianne: Just curious, was one of them Mark J Cuccia? 

Linc: Yes. He made me look like a hobbyist in terms of obsession with area codes.

Adrianne: So  Mark J Cuccia was somebody I came across while Googling. He used to post to this email group called the Telecom Digest, which started on Usenet. He was very into the mechanics of the telephone system and area codes were one of his favorite themes. So he wrote about it a lot. He died in 2014 so, I couldn’t ask him directly, but I can read from his posts in the Telecom Digest email archive.

We might need some basic background. So, AT&T, which was the monopoly controller of the telephone system, assigned a six area codes to the US and Canada in October, 1947. This was called the North American numbering plan.

Mark wrote an article in 1997, commemorating the 50 year anniversary of this original North American numbering plan. And he says that,  “short dial pull area codes” were assigned to “populated areas,” which would have more incoming traffic than less populated areas. But, he doesn’t cite a source for the claim.

And in another essay in 2003, he actually mentions the Boston thing specifically and he calls it an anomaly and hypothesizes that, “I think it was an error in printing that became embedded.”

John: Wait, are you saying that somebody read the wrong area code and assign it to Boston?

Adrianne: That’s basically what I think he’s saying.

John: That’s funny.

Adrianne: But again, he has no evidence. I read every article that Mark J. Cucccia references in the Telecom Digest, Articles in the Bell Labs record, the Bell System technical journal, the Bell Telephone Magazine, and there’s nothing about the speed of dial poles on a rotary phone in relation to how area codes were assigned.

I called the AT&T corporate archives and spoke to their historian, and he was unable to cite a primary source for this off the top of his head. And he couldn’t look it up because theAT&T archives are closed due to COVID.

John: But he was familiar with it?

Adrianne: He was familiar with the dial speed theory. Yes.

John: OK.

Adrianne: And he accepted it. So Telecom Digest listserv, the one where Mark was posting and where Linc may have gotten this theory in the first place, is still active.

John: How long has it been around?

Adrianne: Oh my gosh. Good question. Let me see if it says… 1981!

John: Oh, so they were active when the AT&T monopoly was broken up by the government?

Adrianne: Yes.

John: Oh, it must’ve been rowdy in there.

Adrianne: Oh yeah. And it got a little rowdier when I posted on it too. 

Regina: Oohh.

Billy: Uh, oh. 

Adrianne: So I sent out an email to the Telecom Digest with the subject line, 1947 Area Codes. And it started what I would call a mild flame war.

Regina: Oh, no!

Adrianne: So at the time of this recording all the emails in this thread, including the people who were replying directly to me, are 61 emails in my inbox. 

I want to do a little excerpt from this exchange, and I’m going to need some help here. So I want you all to play some of these parts, okay?

So Billy, you’re going to be Karl. 

Billy: Okay. 

Adrianne: Regina, could you be Neil, please? 

Regina: Sure!

Adrianne: And John, you’re Andy. Okay?

John: Sure!

Adrianne: Does everyone see this script here?

Regina: Yes.

John: Yes.

Billy: Yes.

Adrianne: All right, so please, Karl, go ahead.

Billy: All right. This is a blind table read, so please be forgiving. 

Billy as Karl: The theory that the first area codes were assigned by the speed of dialing because of the time it takes for a rotary dial to return to rest is only grounded in some popular telephone mythology, but not in reality and facts. I don’t know where this mythology originated, but it is a nonsense. IMHO.

Adrianne: So Karl says that area codes were assigned in “pseudo random order”. And he’s really irked that the media continues to perpetuate this idea that it was done by population.

Billy as Karl: It is very hard to prove non-facts or disprove conspiracy theories, such as the myth of dial clicks. Of course, there are no sources against this because the idea is simply false.

Adrianne: But Neil is not having it.

Regina as Neil: I respectfully disagree. There may be no official reference, but the area codes themselves are clearly organized so that the lowest number of clicks codes are assigned to the geographic areas with the highest population density.

Billy as Karl: Really? That’s pretty sad. Principles like that are a sure-fire indication that something is grossly amiss and that you can’t find a better explanation. I hope nobody produces vaccines by those methods. 

Billy: Sorry. I didn’t read that ahead of time. So I was just reading that in real time and I was like, “wow! Okay.”

John: How many posts does Karl have on this Usenet group?

Adrianne: Oh, a lot. I mean, he was at least 25% of the email thread. So I’m not loving the tone here, but Karl goes on to be kind of persuasive.

There is one giant problem with the premise that larger populations got shorter area codes. 

So, if you remember, states with one area code had a 0 in the middle, like 201 for the state of New Jersey, and then states that had multiple area codes, bigger states, had a one in the middle. So, like 413 and 617 in Massachusetts. 

If you’re only looking at area codes that have a one in the middle, you kind of do see this pattern where New York is getting 212, smaller places are getting higher numbers. But if you include states, suddenly the pattern breaks. 

201, which is New Jersey has the lowest possible number of clicks for a one area code State. But that’s still 13 clicks, and New Jersey was really big. It had a population of 4.1 million people in 1940, which was big.

And the next largest population for states that had a single area code was North Carolina, which got 704. 704 is 21 clicks. 

Then there’s Georgia. The entire state of Georgia got 404. That’s 18 clicks. If you include Georgia, North Carolina, New Jersey, these big States, the pattern falls apart.

John: Wait, wait. So if there isn’t a correlation between the population and the number of clicks, does this mean the entire premise of George’s question is incorrect? 

Adrianne: Maybe? Kind of?

John: So, this is kind of what Karl was saying about it being pseudo random?

Adrianne: It’s starting to look that way. Yeah. Karl is making the point that if you look at the whole picture, the pattern doesn’t really exist. 

I’m kind of leaning toward what Karl’s saying at this point. I realized actually this pattern doesn’t seem to be very strong, but then, Andy chimes in.

John: Oh, that’s me.

John as Andy: Greetings all. Having bided my time before taking part in this discussion, I don’t know who wrote the assertion shown above, but he or she is most sorely mistaken for it is not mythology at all.

Adrianne: Andy cites an actual document. A Bell Labs report entitled North American Numbering Plan — the first 30 years historical review of numbering plan area (NPA) code assignments — File 40978. This is dated 12 December, 1975, and the author is RJ Keevers. 

Andy transcribed a paragraph of this report. It says that AT&T recognized that big cities would get lots of incoming call volume, “the time needed to dial 212 is less than half the time needed to dial 909,” and “so it’s clearly saying that shorter codes means it takes less time to place a call, thereby freeing up the capacity of a phone network.”

And then the document goes on to say, “that’s why New York got 212, Los Angeles, got 213 and Chicago got 312. 

So then Andy’s like, mic dropped. 

John as Andy: Have a nice day now!

Adrianne: Okay. So, that’s the end of the play based on this email thread, but Karl and a few other people went on for a while. 

Basically, Karl’s not convinced. But, unfortunately he did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. I did email Andy to see if there’s anything else in that document, but he told me he transcribed everything useful.

Billy: Wow! For people who are obsessed with telephones-

Adrianne: I know! They didn’t want to talk.

Billy: Yeah. None of these people want to speak on one.

Adrianne: Still, I was excited because this feels like the first solid evidence of this dial speed theory. I’ve looked through so many articles published by AT&T and AT&T engineers at this point, and I couldn’t find anything specific to this. And this is the first official AT&T documentation that says, yes, for large populations, we wanted the dial codes to be shorter.

John: Where did Andy find it? 

Adrianne: Andy told me that it was sent to him by someone who’s dead.

John: Okay.

Regina: Before they died.

John: Not, not recently, right?

Adrianne: This is kind of a theme here with this episode. 

While this email action was going down, I was also working a few other angles, and I found an article from the New York Times in 1991 that cited a primary source for the dial speed theory. Bell Communications research, also called Bellcore.

Billy: Nice.

John: That’s a great name for something.

Billy: It’s also the kind of Christmas music I’m into.

Adrianne: Bellcore was one of the entities created after the breakup of AT&T’s monopoly in the 80s. And it was focused on research and development. Today, it’s called iconectiv.

John: Really rolls off the tongue.

Adrianne: Truly. So I reached out to iconectiv and said, “hey, do you have any archival documentation from when you were Bellcore? Did you have some primary sources for this dial speed thing?” And they put me in touch with Gary Richenaker.

Gary: Hello.

Adrianne: Hi, is this Gary? 

Gary: Yeah, this is Gary.

 Adrianne: Gary started at Bell Labs in 1977 and later he ended up at Bellcore. 

So, I have come across this explanation of the more populous areas, getting the quicker to dial numbers, and I’ve been trying to find some AT&T documentation or just contemporary documentation of this. Do you remember where that explanation came from or how you came across it?

Gary: Well, I came across it because it’s kind of like these tails, right? Handed down from Bob Keevers.

Adrianne: Recognize that name?

John: Yes. Is this where Andy got his?

Adrianne: Yes. RJ Keevers was the author of the report that Andy found.

Billy: Wait, RJ Keevers?

Adrianne: Yep. Robert.

Billy: Robert!

Adrianne: So Bob Keevers was also friends with Mark J Cuccia. If you remember Mark, he was the area code hobbyist who wrote about the dial speed theory on the Telecom Digest listserv in the 90s. So, I’m now pretty confident that Bob, whether accurate or not is the source of the dial speed theory.

Billy: Huh?

Adrianne: Bob worked at AT&T, authored this report, friends with Mark J Cuccia, who wrote on the Telecom Digest listserv. That’s where Linc Madison picked it up. Linc Madison, put it on his website. Now, everybody’s sites Linc Madison’s website. Chain of custody. 

Billy: All roads lead back to Bob.

Adrianne: All roads lead to Bob. So I asked Gary, Bob’s protege, about the Boston-617-Western-Mass-413 thing.

Gary: There could have been political pressure for some unknown reason. Like some set of digits was really important to somebody because it had significance. But my recollection of any conversation I had with Bob Keevers, they didn’t really have any vanity discussions, prior to them.

Adrianne: Okay.

Gary: And every, all the vanity stuff came later, like everybody wants a 212 number, right?

Adrianne:  Yep. 

Gary: Or everybody wants the Beverly Hills office code. But that was done long before anybody knew what those were. It’s funny. I don’t know anyone who you could ask about that. I think they’re pretty much six feet under at this point.

Adrianne: so Gary promised that he would look through some documentation he had from Bellcore to see if there was anything written down about the dial speed theory. And then he suggested I talk to Fred Gaechter, who started at AT&T in 1962 and later became the director of numbering strategies at Bellcore. So I’m like, “okay. If anyone would know, it would be this guy.”

John: Okay, wait, wait, wait, wait! 

Regina: Director of Numbering Strategies? Like it was a whole department and yet we still don’t have an answer?

Adrianne: Oh yeah! For sure.

There was the original number, North American numbering plan in 1947, but they drastically underestimated how many area codes they would need. They were literally running out of numbers. There were more people than phone numbers. So-

John: His job was to make more numbers! 

Adrianne: They kept adding more numbering.

Regina: Oh, wow.

John: Huh?

Billy: Yeah, I guess now that I think about it, you would hope there would be at least one person thinking about this, full-time.

Regina: Right. 

Adrianne: Yeah. Lots of numbering strategies to be strategized. Anyway, Fred was director of numbering strategies at Bellcore. So, I’ve figured if anybody would know it had to be this guy. 

I emailed Fred. I asked him about Boston getting 617 while Western Mass got 413 and he got back to me right away.

“Interesting question indeed for which I have no answer. Often wondered about it myself. Even when in the NANP administrator’s role, I could not find the documented answer. There was a lot of supposition and inference around the question, but even those who were in the know about the numbering plan before my time had no definitive answer.” 

So, this was pretty discouraging, basically nobody knows, and everybody is dead.

Billy: That would be the ultimate story of humanity.

Adrianne: The AT&T archive is closed for the foreseeable future due to COVID, I’ve read everything about area code numbering that I could find from AT&T. I also skimmed through copies of telephone topics, which was the in-house magazine for the new England telephone company. 

I also found a book called the history of the telephone in Western Massachusetts, which I was really excited about because it seemed pretty spot on but, nothing about this. I was feeling really stuck. So I started working on a kind of intense maybe unhinged project in Google spreadsheets.

Billy: Now that’s our sweet spot.

Adrianne: I downloaded country level census data for 1940 and 1950. And then I figured out what area code those counties would have been in in 1947. And then I compared the population. And number of rotary clicks for all area codes. So, here is a chart showing the population for 1940 versus the length of dialing. 

John: We see it. There’s a scatter plot. So, it looks like the higher the population, roughly higher the population, the fewer number of dial clicks it requires. 

Adrianne: Right. 

John: But it’s pretty, scattery like, it’s not-

Adrianne: It’s a pretty weak-

John: Yeah.

Adrianne: It’s a pretty weak correlation.

John: Without the trend line on here, I don’t think I would see a correlation on this graph.

Adrianne: Yeah. You remember how Gary, the former Bellcore person I interviewed said he was going to look through some of his old documents? He sent me an email with an attachment.

John: Is this the- is this the piece that it’s going to break this case wide open?

Adrianne: Well, it turned out to be a full copy of the document that Andy quoted from in his email. That was the only primary source that I was able to find for the idea that population was used to determine area codes. 

Andy had told me there was nothing else interesting in that document, but that’s not true. It had a map in it. Actually, multiple maps.

One of these maps is an earlier version of the North American numbering plan. It says it is from “early 1947,” which would have been maybe six months before the final plan was released. And it is totally different. Here’s the map. And here is the final plan they went with.

John: Hmm. Oh, these are very different from each other.

Regina: Yeah. 

Adrianne: I’m pretty sure nobody other than New York and New Jersey has the same code between these two versions which were months apart.

Regina: New Hampshire. 

John: Wow. Okay. New Hampshire is the same too but, everything else looks different.

Adrianne: So AT&T appears to have had a complete plan for area codes months before they were finalized and then changed it almost a 100%. 

John: Wow!

Billy: Aha! Okay.

John: Wait. So, where’s Massachusetts?

Adrianne: So we know that Eastern Massachusetts, Boston ended up getting 617, and Western Massachusetts ended up getting 413. But in the original plan, neither of them had either of those. They were 516 for Western Massachusetts, and 515 for Boston. Totally different.

John: And with fewer pulls.

Adrianne: Both fewer pulls, both with about the same number of pulls.

According to Gary, AT&T would have sent this tentative plan, the one with 516 and 515 for Massachusetts out to the regional telecoms to get feedback. And then, those companies probably wrote back with all of their suggestions, complaints, et cetera. And then in the next iteration, Boston became 617 and Western Mass became 413, and also pretty much all of the other area codes across this map changed.

So, there were a lot of considerations in these area code assignments that were documented. There were existing traffic routes. There were different centers, had different equipment. Every iteration of the network had to be backwards compatible, and the company also wanted to make things easy for operators to remember.

They also said, they wanted to avoid using patterns that would be difficult to maintain as the network grew.

John: Oh, so we’ll just start random and let it keep being random?

Regina: Yeah, what does that mean? Yeah.

Adrianne: Well, I think it’s more like the end result of all of these conflicting priorities was that it does look a lot like randomness with pockets of patterns. 

Regina: Right. 

Adrianne: I don’t have any definitive proof of this, but correlation with population in order to minimize rotary spins seems like it might’ve been a factor that was taken into consideration but, it’s clear that it was not a high priority.

In other words, what happened to Boston, isn’t really that much of an anomaly. What seems more likely is that AT&T had to balance a lot of factors when giving out numbering assignments and this is how it shook out.

John: And this myth caught on just because that one guy wrote it up?

Adrianne: I think so.

John: Huh?

Adrianne: It’s time to deliver the news to George. 

So we spoke, I think in November.

George: Been that long. Wow.

Adrianne: I told George that the original premise turned out to be less rigid than we realized. He agreed that it was odd. He pointed out that there are some other cities. 

I told him about the 1975 memo by Bob Keevers, which was the only document I could find that mentioned visiting all original source documentation for even this.

George: Right. Right. 

Adrianne: And finally, I explained that the correlation between population and area code, dial speed kind of falls apart when you look at all the area codes together, like it really only holds true for New York and Chicago. And then it starts to go in different directions. 

It seems like one factor out of many. And this one population thing is like a sticky fact that people like liked and glommed onto. And I think it took on a little bit- it grew maybe a little bit larger than it loomed in the beginning. If that makes sense.

George: No, it does. And especially if you look at it and you start at the list, like 212, like I said before, is this. And then you start paying attention it gets messier once you get past the first three or four codes, then that makes sense. 

When I envisioned the people doing this, I envision a bunch of, a bunch of white guys with glasses and short cropped hair, doing things perfectly with the slide rolls, were they used back then. And that they wouldn’t- they had to do it perfectly with regard to population. 

They probably had some sort of a spreadsheet or whatever, but there’s something in of itself satisfying that they said, “eh, we’ll get the further out the rest of- whatever, it doesn’t matter that much ”.

And it is something there’s something actually very, very pleasant about that maybe these people back then just didn’t care as much as we do nowadays. And people stick bumper stickers in the back of their cars with their area code, you know, like I’m a, one of the, I’m a 305 down in Miami. People take such pride in these codes. And I think the people who’ve made these codes might find it kind of funny that, well, you know, “212 to New York, but from them, we kind of got lazy and whatever.” And, it’s really fascinating. Wow! How cool.

Adrianne: So George is a professor and he likes to play around with statistics. I sent him my spreadsheet and he came back even more convinced that there was no correlation between population and area code assignment. He wrote back and said, “for me, at least these analyses are a slam dunk case for your hypothesis. Beyond the first three area codes, it’s clear that population had very little to do with how area codes were chosen. Wow!”

Billy: Underunderstood is made by Regina Dellea, Adrian Jeffries, John Largomarsino and me Billy Disney.

Regina: We are an independent podcast. If you like the show, maybe think about supporting us on Patreon.

John: If you do, you’ll get access to our bonus show Overunderstood. And you can come chat with us in our Discord server. 

Billy: Which is very organized now by the way. 

John: And ruled with an iron fist.

Regina: Yeah. Shoutout to our mods.

Adrianne: If you have a question or a comment or you happen to have a copy of the 1947 letter to AT&T’s general traffic members with subject line, Numbering Plan Area Arrangements? I’m still looking for that one.

Send us an email at hello@underunderstood.com.

Billy: Thanks for listening!