STORY #27
TELEPHONE TECHNOLOGY IN PEEBLES
Algebra teacher, Mr. Raymond Peterson, would probably have had a good laugh if, at the beginning of the 1960-61 school year, one of his students asked, how do you figure out how many seven digit telephone phone numbers are possible in the Peebles area? The problem wouldn't have made much sense to most. But the telephone universe was rapidly changing and Peebles was being confronted with something new called ANC, All Number Calling.
The Georgetown district of The General Telephone Company was made up of four telephone exchanges in Adams County: Peebles, Manchester, Seaman and West Union, and the Sinking Spring exchange that included parts of Adams, Highland and Pike Counties. That amounted to approximately 2,500 phones covering an area of 525 square miles. Robert L. Keatley, commercial manager of General Telephone's district office in Georgetown, said the installation of ANC was part of the development of a world-wide telephone numbering system, that was being assembled so that anyone, anywhere could call anyone, anywhere by dialing a series of designated numbers without any assistance from anyone.
Rotary dial phones were invented in the mid 1890's and slowly became available in larger cities along with trained telephone operators during the late 1900's and early 1920's. They didn't come into widespread use until the 1930's when the live, local operators started to be phased out in favor of more advanced mechanical equipment. The availability of the new devices was slightly behind the growth of the village of Peebles. By 1931, the number of requests for telephone calls that would be handled by the human operators at the Peebles exchange required the installation of sixty new electrical boxes.
The village continued to grow and the demand for more and better equipment soared. Additionally, Mr. Wamsley had purchased the downtown lot and building where the phone operators office was located so he could build an up-to-date motion picture theater.
The telephone operations were then moved from the east side of Main Street to the west side into property owned by Mrs. J. R. Thomas. The phone enterprise and the ever-changing advancements in technology were eventually taken over by the Ohio Standard Telephone Company and later, the General Telephone Company.
By the mid 1950's, innovations in the telecommunications industries were making it possible for almost all Americans to make their phone calls unassisted. However, long distance and collect-calls were still being handled with live human intervention, usually by someone located many miles away. Dialing seven digits became the norm, using the so called “metropolitan” system that consisted of dialing two or three letters followed by a designated number of assigned numerical digits.
In September, 1960, to conform with other developing systems, the letters were replaced by numbers and the use of area prefixes became the standard: 386 for Seaman, 544 for West Union, 549 for Manchester, 587 for Peebles and 588 for Sinking Spring. At the same time, Sinking Spring circuits were upgraded from a four number dialing system to the new seven number system. The changes also gave callers access to the nationwide operator, or self-dialing network, which became known as direct-dial long distance. In the early days of All Number Calling there were only ten exchanges in Ohio advanced enough to use the system. Seven of those, including Adams County, were General Telephone exchanges.
The cost for constructing the new facilities and for providing new switching equipment was approximately $130,000. Six hundred thirty-seven phones in a one hundred fifty-five square mile area became connected. Another expansion came along in 1969, in which the switching equipment was upgraded again. As a result, every number in the exchange had to be reassigned to a different phone and party lines became relics.
