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Some of our family members or some old movies will show us that people used to call an operator in 1950s to get connected to a phone number, it is nearly 7 decades that we had to use an intermediary to connect to a line and technology evolved to a stage we can only do a call by even voice commanding to your smartphones or use a shortlisted number to press and it dials the number to our saved destination.
There are various claims about the oldest numbers till in use in the world, but much evidence claim that, it is the number that was also included in the Glenn Miller’s hit song in 1940s Pennsylvania 6-5000. The phone number is 212 736 5000 which belongs to a hotel named “Hotel Pennsylvania” in New York United States and it is the oldest continually used number.
Differences between UK and US phone numbers
It is very interesting that first assigned numbers stater with only 3 digits, then it became 4 and now 10 digits in the US. In the UK we have numbers up to 10 digits similar to US. We have smaller digit area codes assigned to the larger cities in the UK, this allows the allocation of more numbers since the local number part has more digits. Local numbers are four to eight digits in the format, in general we also have numbers with 10 digits and rarely 9 digits in the UK. The code assigned to the largest population is 020 which covers London and the code assigned to the largest are is 028 for Northern Ireland.
Alexander Graham Bell was awarded the first US patent for the invention of the telephone in 1876 that means the history of phone number should go back to 19th century and we are aware it took until 1938 for the technology to reach isolated areas in the country. The first telephone exchange in the United Kingdom was established in London in 1879, at first the phone numbers were not standardised, and users could request numbers of varying lengths. However, as the user number increased, a standardised numbering system became essential to ensure efficient communication.
The main system used in the UK is nationwide numbering system which divided the numbers to regions with unique digits length from 2-4. Then evolvement of area codes started, and we can guess the location of the caller by checking the area code easily since the codes are easy to reach and announced by British Telecom online.
Oldest phone number in the UK
Although changes occurred there are still 3-5 digit phone numbers in the UK when the area code is disregarded, there are strange experiences as some users with these short digits calling their network provider for reporting fault on their line and when asked to provide the phone number the customer service agent keeps on saying can you please provide all the digits in your phone line number and it must be very difficult to reach at a common sense regarding this as it might be very unusual to recognise for a new starting customer service agent or someone with no knowledge that we still have these 3-5 digit phone numbers present in the UK when area code is omitted.
There had been numerous changes in the phone number format in the UK but overall, the development of technology in communication had been stunning. It is still the fact that the oldest phone number which is still in use continuously is in the US owned by Hotel Pennsylvania.