Re: More on San Francisco and Oakland Numbering

> Thanks to the clipping files at the History Room of the Oakland Public
>> Library, I have been able to pin down the date that San Francisco and >> Oakland went fully to 2L-5N numbers: August 10, 1947, a Sunday, at 12 >> midnight. >> The Tribune referred to it on Saturday, which would have been August >> 9, of course, but it also is clear from the context that the >> switchover activities began on Saturday night. Either the Tribune's >> style considered the day to begin at 12.01 am, or there was some >> confusion when the story was edited.

The standard nationwide time for making changes was 3:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, which would be 12:01 a.m. Pacifc Standard Time, still on Sunday. (A day does began at 12:01 a.m.; it's not just a style issue.)

> In other words, there was, for a time, 2L-5N-1L dialing to some >> exchanges! > I always wondered if that existed. When did party line letters go > away and replaced by individual dialable numbers? On SxS there was a > coding schema where one digit differed for each party, all others the > same.

I lived in a small place that had terminal-per-line SxS. Terminal per line means that the line is designated by a number; an additional number is required to desginate the party and the number is listed in the directory that way without any hyphens or other distinctions.

All the party lines were in the same connector group.

Later terminal-per-station became the standard, where each terminal on the connector designates an individual station. So a two-party line would require two terminals (and two directory numbers), a four-party line would have four terminals (and four directory numbers) and an eight-party line would require eight terminals (and eight directory numbers).

This much simplified intercept and regrouping. In most offices any terminal could be jumpered to any ringing bus in the terminal, so it could be the ring party at one time, after regrouping or other changes it could be made the tip party, and in offices with full selective four-party ringing any terminal could be connected to any of the ringing buses -- postive tip, positive ring, negarive tip, negative ring.

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> It has more than 333,000 unfilled telephone orders, also a second >> place record. > Bad problem throughout the U.S., took years to clean up. Many people > who get service were stuck with party lines, partly as a result of > inadequate CO capacity, not just local loop capacity. I wonder if > they were afraid of slow dial tone during busy periods and the use of > party lines was a way of rationing out service capacity. I wonder if > in those years they added new manual exchanges as a temporary fix > since cord switchboards were a lot cheaper and faster to install than > dial machines.

The shortages went back to the Great Depression of the 1930s, when capital spending was necessarily reduced and indeed with the loss of customers and lack of construction there was little need for capital expenditures.

The outside plant was usually the limiting factor--an individual copper pair was needed for each line. After World War II (during which construction and capital spending was almost non-existent) there were many cable routes that had not been reinforced since before the Depression. When the end of the war came, there were suddenly new housing developments, new business and industrial construction,. and heavy new demands for service. Their magnitude was such that the sudden change for little demand to furious demand could not be met overnight, both because of the finite funds available for capital spending and the very real limits on production capacity.

The famous Levittown communities had to make do with temporary corner > pay phones for a while.

So did many other new developments all across the U.S.A.

Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@aol.com