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.
By 1930, almost 41% of American housing units featured a telephone. But the Depression undid many of these gains. By 1933, more than 2.5 million households had cancelled their service and fewer than a third of American homes were reachable by phone. Which perhaps explains why corporations like American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) and the Bell Telephone Company spent so much of the first half of the twentieth century trying to teach us how to use the things.
This ca. 1950 guide to telephone etiquette was one of many released by telephone service companies around this time to help people and companies navigate the use of telephone technology and etiquette. It was published by Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania, founded in 1879 as the Bell Telephone Company of Philadelphia, then a subsidiary of National Bell Telephone Company, founded in 1877, by Alexander Graham Bell's father-in-law Gardiner Greene Hubbard (1822-1897).
This item is Pam 96.183 in Hagley Library's Published Collections. If you need to help cultivate your "telephone personality", you can read the whole pamphlet in our Digital Archives. Just click here!