Did you know?

Telephone operators, 1952 In the earliest days of telephone technology, before the development of the rotary dial telephone, all telephone calls were operator-assisted. To place a call, you were required to pick up the telephone receiver and wait for the telephone operator to answer, you would then ask to be connected to the number you wished to call, and finally the operator would make the required connection manually, by means of a switchboard. In an emergency, you might simply say “Get me the police,” “I want to report a fire,” or “I need an ambulance/doctor.” Until the dial tone telephone came into widespread use in the 1950s, you just couldn’t place calls without operator assistance.

In the United States, the push for the development of a nationwide emergency telephone number came in 1957 when the National Association of Fire Chiefs recommended that a single number be used for reporting fires. In 1967, President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice recommended the creation of a single number that could be used nationwide for reporting all emergencies. The burden then fell on the Federal Communications Commission, which then met with AT&T (the major telephone carrier at that time) in November 1967, in order to come up with a solution.

Finally, in January 1968, AT&T implemented the concept with its unique emergency number, 911 (partly based on Britain’s precedent of a three-digit number), which was brief, easy to remember, dialed easily, and worked well with the phone systems in place at the time.

Calling this single number provided a caller access to police, fire, and ambulance services, through what would become known as a common Public-Safety Answering Point (PSAP). The number itself, however, did not become widely known until the 1970s, and many municipalities did not have 911 service until well into the 1980s.

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