The free long distance information was also to save them time. In the pre-DDD days of the 1950s and earlier, it was common for people to call by city and person, i.e. "Long Distance get me John Jones in Kansas City". The long distance operator would have to call KC D/A first to get his number, then ring up Mr. Jones himself. Obviously they wanted to free the operator from that first step and encouraged people to keep a distant callers name and number, including the new area code. If someone didn't know the distant number, they could find it out for themselves, again, saving an operator's time.
I think today if you were to try to place a call by name they'd do it for you but charge you a special fee "Information via Operator charge" and it is not cheap ($2.50-$5.00). Indeed, if one checks modern tarrifs operators now charge a few bucks for many services once free (ie verification of a busy line, breaking in for an emergency call, etc.)
Bell always used to encourage "> The addresses that Switchboard.com and others have do not come from
Those web services are inaccurate. What troubles me is that lay people take them for gospel. (Recently the Inquirer published college profs saying Wikpedia is NOT an allowable/authorative reference source for papers; though many people think it is.)
On those sites I am listed with a phone I disconnected in 2001. I am not listed with my present phone. Actually I am, but my name is spelled wrong so a name look up won't find me.
I got upset when a distant relative called me and complained "I had a tough time finding you, your phone is not listed." I replied that my phone is and always has been listed in the phone book. She said "well, it wasn't on the web."
There's a heck of a lot of crap on the web and ordinary consumers don't know it.
Another example is these automatic routing programs from map services. I know several people who ended up on dead-end streets in high crime neighborhoods because the mapgen thought it was an on-ramp and it wasn't. There are many streets on official maps that don't exist in reality -- they were planned but never physically put in or deleted. The mapgens don't know it. They also can't tell the difference between a through street and an alleyway and route people wrong.
But it amazes me that otherwise intelligent people use these functions and thing because they came from the computer/web they're perfectly reliable. (Why they can't look themselves on a road map I don't know.)