We used to dial fictional places like ‘Murray Hill’

One of the famous props from early television’s most popular situation comedy series was the vintage black Western Electric rotary dial, desk-style telephone. 

It rang frequently in the New York City apartment of Ricky and Lucy Ricardo, primary characters in “I Love Lucy.”

 

You might be a TV trivia expert if you knew the Ricardos’ number by heart – Murray Hill 5-9975. 

Nick Greene, former editor-at-large with the Mental Floss online magazine, commented that what seemed so normal in the early 1950s may “sound gibberish to modern phone users.” 

The “I Love Lucy” show aired on CBS for six seasons, from 1951-57, and the Murray Hill “prefix” was actually an exchange within the New York Bell Telephone Company. 

Originally, Murray Hill 5-9975 was an “unused number.” But when it was entered into service, the phone company gave the show’s producers a new number to use. (Over the course of the show’s run, Ricky and Lucy also were assigned Murray Hill 5-9099 and Circle 7-2099.) 

In those days, to call a number in the Murray Hill exchange, for example, all one had to dial was the “MU,” followed by the five numbers. 

Each rotary dial phone had letters that corresponded with the numbers. The configuration is a bit quirky, however. Each number, 2-9, got three letters assigned to it. Within this scheme, Q was omitted.

 

The phone company didn’t assign any letters to the number 1, because Bell wanted to reserve 1 for special functions. Zero was used to signal the operator and was given the Z, a letter not used in any of the exchanges. 

By 1955, engineers at Bell were well into their plan to move the nation into “All-Number Calling” – no letters, just digits. 

Megan Garber of The Atlantic magazine said Bell anticipated users of the telephone system would likely resist the change. So, Bell officials built in long grace periods for people to gradually adjust and adapt to “modernization.” 

“Still, people protested,” Garber said. An “Anti-Digit Dialing League” opposed what it termed “creeping numeralism.” 

To use the old rotary phones, “you placed a finger in the hole of the number/letter you intended to dial, then rotated the dial clockwise until you hit the phone’s metal finger stop,” Garber said. “What this translated to, as far as the phone was concerned, was a series of clicks. Lower numbers on the phone, starting with 1, registered fewer clicks than the higher numbers.”

“Bell’s engineers had also planned for the addition of the three-digit area codes,” Garber said. “New York, the most densely populated area of the nation, got 212 – containing the lowest number of clicks offered on the rotary phone. Los Angeles got 213, while Chicago got 312 and Detroit got 313.” 

“Anchorage, Alaska, on the other hand, got 907, which required 26 clicks from the person doing the dialing.” 

Garber said the first test-run of the area code system occurred in 1951. “With 100 guests watching, Mayor M. Leslie Denning of Englewood, N.J., dialed 415-523-9727. 

Exactly 17 seconds later, Denning’s call was picked up by Frank Osborn, the mayor of Alameda, Calif.

Garber wrote: “Bell engineers called the cross-continental conversation a ‘historic first in communications.’” 

She said that even The New York Times was impressed by the test-call. The reporter covering the story wrote: 

“The vine-like network…will grow like an atomic age descendant of Jack the Giant Killer’s beanstalk.”