Touch Tone at 1964 World's Fair [telecom] Featured

hancock4 · 2008-07-07T22:19:55+00:00

Touch-Tone telephone dialing (commonly called push-button dialing)made its major public debut at the New York World's Fair in 1964,located in Flushing Meadows Park in Queens. The Bell System providedabout 7,000 pay phones for the fair grounds of new Touch Tonetelephones in futuristic swirl phone booths. (The booths werespacious and had thick dividers for good acoustics. However, theywere open at the top. A simple canopy gave some rain protection, butnot as much as the traditional phone booth did.)I believe direct distance dialing (via TSP) was also available fromfair coin telephones.Unlike many other enterprises involved with the fair, New YorkTelephone charged its normal rates. Local calls from the fair were adime, like everywhere else.Part of the publicity was providing the fair president, Robert Moses,with a Touch Tone phone for his desk*.This debut followed successful trials and offerings of service in thetowns of Carnegie and Greensburg, Pennsylvania in November of 1963.In April 1964, residents of Queens, New York, where the fair was held,could order Touch Tone for their homes. The rate was $1.90 perresidential line per month. (Pennsylvania subscribers could get itfor $1.50 per month).Everything didn't go smoothly. In April 1964, before the fair opened,there were problems with pilferage from exhibits. Bell Telephoneclaimed 3,500 of its 6,500 phones were vandalized even though "thephones won't work anywhere else". The newspaper report on this wasn'ttoo clear, but I find it hard to believe that 3,500 pay phones werestolen or even vandalized. But behind the scenes, things weren'tgoing well at the Fair; a great deal of dissention.I wonder how much extra switching capacity and trunking had to beinstalled in the Corona-Flushing Central Office to accomodate all theWorld's Fair traffic from both exhibitors and patrons. Obviously TTconverters were necessary, but they'd need more capacity overall, pluslong distance trunking and operator services for all the...

Jul 07, 2008 22 Replies

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Steven Lichter 18 years ago

Ah the old days in the middle of the night and hearing a call move through an old SXS switch, and sometimes if a relay is a little off you can hear the talking, I miss that, maybe we should go back!!

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