History of Area Code Day

Area Codes first came into existence in the 1940’s in the laboratories of AT&T and Bell, slowly but surely this idea was expanded on and developed until it finally went into effect in 1947. It was called the North American Numbering Plan (NANP) and would solve the issue of not enough phone numbers for both the USA and Canada. It all started with numbering states and provinces with a single area code were assigned codes that had a 0 in the middle.

There’re some creative ideas that were implemented to help make dialing easier, including how the numbers were distributed. Live in an area that has a lot of people in it? They’ll be assigned area codes that have lower numbers at the beginning and end. Why? Well, in those days phone calls were made with rotary dialers, and it was determined that those in denser populated areas should be able to dial faster. How do you make rotary phones dial faster? By using numbers that were closer to zero so they had a shorter pull time.

Yeah… If you’ve never seen a rotary phone you probably have no idea what we’re talking about, but trust us, at the time? It worked.