A vintage phone number on a vintage record...

[Greg G.]

Going through a stack of 78s I bought and came across this.  About what years were 4 digit phone numbers?

[Craig T]

This should give a rough idea. The bulleted list at the top give date ranges for when prefix codes were first applied to the 4 digit code.

http://www.privateline.com/TelephoneHistory3A/numbers.html

[Phonesrfun]

Going through a stack of 78s I bought and came across this.  About what years were 4 digit phone numbers?

Every city was different, and in the case of Portland, the 6 digits did not convert to 7 digits all at once.  Portland changed from 6 digits to 7 pretty much in 1957, although some new offices that were opened in the 1955 to 1957 years were opened as 7 digits, I believe.  

When you say 4 digits, it was really 6 since exchange names were usually the first 2, followed by the 4 digit numerical part.

Seattle may have been about the same time frame, since Portland and Seattle were pretty much joined at the hip as far as telephony were concerned.  I got my information by looking through the old type-written and hand-written card file for the newspaper microfilm stacks and then going to the microfilm reels at the Portland Multnomah County library a couple years ago.  Perhaps the new Seattle public library has the same sort of thing.

My original number in Portland as a kid was LIncoln-1971 (Which numerically was 54-1971)  In 1957, Pacific Northwest Bell added a 2 in the front, making it ALpine 4-1971 (254-1971)


-Bill

[bingster]

When you say 4 digits, it was really 6 since exchange names were usually the first 2, followed by the 4 digit numerical part.

That's the case with the record label.  The phone number is CA-9522.  

Also remember the numbers varied widely even in a small area.  In my DC phone book from 1948, all the metropolitan area numbers were six digits, but I have a 1948 phone book from an area ten miles away, and the numbers are 2, 3, and 4 digits.  It just depended on how many people were attached to their local central office.  

So the short answer is there's no national cut-off year for numbers of digits.  They ranged from 2 to 7 from the early 1920s through the 50s, and it all depended on where you lived, rather than the year.