On this date, November 18, in 1963, Bell Telephone began offering the world's first commercial service for an electronic push-button, touch-tone telephone. Service was initially limited to customers in the towns of Carnegie and Greensburg, Pennsylvania. Bell System customers who paid an additional fee for the service received a touch-tone telephone with 10 push buttons manufactured by Western Electric Manufacturing (the addition of the * and # keys would arrive soon after).
However, the concept behind the push-button telephone was not new to 1963, however. Various attempts at push-button dialing were made by telecommunications inventors dating to at least as far back as 1887, not long after the first commercial telephone exchange was opened on January 28, 1878 with 21 subscribers in New Haven, Connecticut.
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