My guess is that the 911 surcharge on our phone bills replaces
> general tax dollars once used to pay for such services.
There was no 911 service before the 911 tax (not a surcharge, a legally binding tax.)
But the real question is how were such expenses paid in the past,
> between Bell and the police? That is, in the past one dialed 0-
> operator and asked for help and the Bell operator connected the person
> to the cops. I believe the calls were free. If need be, the
> operators would stay on the line to assist, indeed, the Bell System
> made a big deal about heroic assistance provided by an operator to
> someone in distress. I do not think Bell got any extra compensation
> for that service (unlike today, where if you merely stare at the 0
> button you get charged service fee.)
Before 911 it was a telephone serivce paid for by the cops. The 911 idea came later, and many people wondered why, since there seemed to be no real problen with the "Dial-Operator" arrangement, for which there was no charge to the caller (you think anyone would have stood for having to pay for calling the police?) Regular charge for whatever service and equipment the cops had, charged to the police.
Presumably Bell did collect rental on the police dept telephones.
> Bell had dispatcher switchboards as part of its product line for
> larger police departments.
Many businesses and operations needed dispatching equipment, not just police departments.
Basic 911 goes way back when it was merrly a dial shortcut in cities
Never heard of 911 other than that associated with the entire 911 philosophy.
Did Bell get anything for that; or were they just happy to remove
> some call volume from 0-operators?
Don't know and don't know how you would know where to terminate the
911 calls, if that ever existed other than the entire 911 she-bang. PSAPs were a concept of the 911 philosophy.
Note that in the 1970s Bell needed to add more operators, despite
> automation, to handle ever more requests for operator services, and
> was naturally concerned about the increased labor costs. That's when
> they introduced discounts for dialed direct station toll calls and
> surcharges for operator handled toll calls. Directory assistance > charges came next.
Reduced rates for DDD station-to-station calls came with the first DDD installation in the 1950s or 1960s. Person-to-person calls (operator handled, of course) go back before DDD, i.e., in the days of manual offices.
911 service, of course, applies for a lot of emergencies, not just the cops.
Maybe in your neck of the woods, but in NYC the "911 service" has been in operation, originally paid for out of general tax revenue, since
1970 or so.
The first step was to consolidate all the different phone numbers (you used to call the local precinct. The "Kitty genovese" story vividly demonstrated some of those problems).
In the mid 1960s NYC oganized all police dispatch (let's not talk about fire...) into one office, using a single seven digit phone number.
(Ok, you old timers, dust off those memory cells.)
This was later upgraded, so to speak, into using the three digits we're now all accustomed to.
But again, at least for the first few years, all of this was financed through standard tax revenue. It was only later that NYC, as well as more and more other jurisdictions, decided to use sleight-of-hand tricks to get more cash into the stream, but pretend it wasn't a government tax.
Many years ago Los Angeles City had a single 3 digit number (116) with the ad on radio and TV " If your in a fix dial 116", this was for police and fire, I would guess it was paid for with regular city funds.
Cities had 911 service _decades_ before it was taxed.
Before that, cities had central dispatching units to handle such calls.
In a city, where the police/fire/rescue district normally coincided with the telephone district, dialing zero was not an issue.
In 1968 most pay phones were coin first. But 911 was planned to be no coin required, a feature keeping pay phones active to this day as emergency phones.
But in suburban communities, which were growing, very often the telephone district and the municipal service boundary did not match. A suburban telephone exchange could easily be handling at least three or four different municipalities. Likewise, a suburban municipality could be supported by multiple exchange districts.
See NYT 1/13/68, 6/27/68.
911 is a service that evolved over time. (Just as ESS was once analog and is now digital). It saved time from dialing the operator and asking for help and was intended to be a universal number. It began in 1968.
Later "enhanced 911" came along that was more sophisticated. I believe it was around that time the tax came out.
Was that for state services? It seems strange to have a discounted rate for something the vast majority of subscribers did not have access to.
I remembver when the new interstate long distance rate structure came out, circa 1970, and it was a big deal because it: 1) added a third highly discounted period, at that time after 12 midnight, 2) reduced the initial period to one minute instead of three minutes, 3) reduced rates overall, and 4) gave additional discounts to dialed-direct station rates. By 1970 most of the country had DDD for station-to- station non-coin calls (though 0+ for other calls was by no means universal).
Before the DDD discounts there were two rates--station to station in which charges began when the phone was answered, and person to person when the desired person came to the phone. Person to person was obviously higher. There were no surcharges for operator assistance on station calls, such as time & charges, 3 minute notification, 3rd number billing, collect, credit card, coin, and/or extension ONI*, even though more operator time was required.
*A special business service where an operator would ask for a code, assigned to each extension of a PBX, so outward calls could be tracked.
Before the 1960s person-to-person calls were very common for businesses. Charging did not start until the desired party came to the phone and the conversation began. Into the 1950s many people placed a call by name "get me Joe Smith in Kansas City", which meant the local toll operator had to first call directory, then make the actual call. The telephone compnay pushed "call by number" and later "call by area code and number".
Until the early 1980s my town (San Clemente, CA) was in its own Pacific Telephone exchange. 911 routed calls directly to our local police department's dispatch desk with none of the enhancements of E911. The northern 20% of the town was in another exchange so they were periodically informed to dial the 7-digit emergency number.
And there were locales, into the 1970s, where outlying surban areas had a _commercial_telephone_answering_ service answering the fire dept _emergency_ line. If somebody called the sheriff (no local police) to report a fire, _they_ called the answering service for fire dispatch.
Dialing the operator, from a pay phone, _to_this_day_, doesn't require depositing any coins. Even on 'coin first' phones. Even on COCOTS.
Thus, 911 didn't and doesn't bring any benefit, over dialing the operator, to preserving coin-op phone use.
I didn't say "all" cities. But many places had 911 service long before they starting adding a tax for it on the phone bill.
Allow me to clarify. In the old days, most pay phones required a coin deposit first to make _any_ kind of call. The coin was held, and if the line was busy or no answer the coin was returned. (Some rural pay phones worked differently).
In the late 1960s, partly in response to urban crime, pay phones were modified to be "dial tone first". No coin was required to dial the operator. If 911 was available, no coin was required for that either. The above mentioned NYT article said dial-tone-first was going in at the same time as 911 service.
An additional benefit of dial-tone-first was that the caller up front would know if the pay phone was broken by not getting a dial tone.
As to "keeping pay phones active to this day", here's how: Many passenger rail carriers want to provide an emergency telephone for people in distress at a station. There are various ways this could be done, but the cheapest way is to arrange to have a standard pay phone in the station (no coin is required to call 911).
Since coin collections these days are low, the carrier usually has to pay the phoneco to have the phone, but that payment is cheaper than providing other types of emergency phones. In addition, those passengers who don't have a cell phone, as some today, have the convenience of a pay phone to make calls (I do see people using them from time to time.)
Some carriers have posted signs stating "in case of emergency use pay phone to call 911, no coin required".
Some carriers designate some phones to be able to use coins to call long distance, 25c a minute, $1 minimum. (This was a welcome convenience for me before I got my cellphone).
Our municipal pool has a payphone, with a sign near it saying the same as above. The pool office has a phone, but I guess this is a backup. Also, it's there if any kid needs to call home and doesn't have their cell phone with them.
RI has had E-911 state wide since the mid 1980's. And because of the way they structured the E-911 system they made it easy for other carriers to tap into the E-911 system.
I know of at least one of the 50 largest SMSA where that was not the case. I'm willing to bet that there were many more.
That may have been true for NYC. It was *NOT* the case for many other areas. I, personally, used what you call 'dial tone first' phones -- in a fair-sized city -- in the _early_ 1960s. Those were the -only- kind of phones available anywhere in the area. In fact I never encountered a pay- phone of the 'post-pay' (deposit coins to open the outgoing talk path _after_ the call connected) until sometime in the late 1970s, in a very rural area in the northern Rockies.
GTE and a lot of others had post pay. I know in the days before Cell Phone when we were out in the field we would dial the CO; which had non-reversing lines or the operator and ID yourself as an employee and get the company number you needed.
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