999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
independent.co.uk
999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
1–10 of 71 posts
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#2There was an article on Tedium just ~1 week ago about the emergency numbers!
http://tedium.co/2017/06/20/911-emergency-system-history/
It references the birth of 999, but then continues with the story of emergency numbers in the US. Definitely an interesting read.
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#3999 was crappy design for "emergency" as, in the analog era, it would take almost 9x the time to dial it as that of a number like 111 or 112.
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#4999 was crappy design for "emergency" as, in the analog era, it would take almost 9x the time to dial it as that of a number like 111 or 112.
I was told it was selected because it can be dialed in the dark - just go all the way way with the rotor three times. I've always found that 999 sounds like an emergency, the biggest number. 112 seems absolutely arbitrary to me.
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#5There was an article on Tedium just ~1 week ago about the emergency numbers! http://tedium.co/2017/06/20/911-emergency-system-history/ It references the birth of 999, but then continues with the story of emergency numbers in the US. Definitely an interesting read.
Yikes, the font on that website is incredibly distracting. Hard enough that I went and downloaded Readability for Chrome just to get through the article.
Reading more than a sentence caused my eyes to sort of glaze over and even when trying to focus I was reading but not grasping. Can't say I've ever had a font do that to me.
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#6999 was crappy design for "emergency" as, in the analog era, it would take almost 9x the time to dial it as that of a number like 111 or 112.
Well the Wikipedia article on the subject is very instructive:
"The 9-9-9 format was chosen based on the 'button A' and 'button B' design of pre-payment coin-operated public payphones in wide use (first introduced in 1925) which could be easily modified to allow free use of the 9 digit on the rotary dial in addition to the 0 digit (then used to call the operator)"
So there were valid technical reasons, as well as 999 being harder to dial by accident.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/999_(emergency_telephone_num...
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#7999 was crappy design for "emergency" as, in the analog era, it would take almost 9x the time to dial it as that of a number like 111 or 112.
Interestingly the reason is analogue in nature. With pulse dialing a single pulse for a 1 could happen by accident quite easily (e.g. two lines knocking into each other). 999 can't happen accidentally.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/london/hi/people_and_places/hist...
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#8999 was crappy design for "emergency" as, in the analog era, it would take almost 9x the time to dial it as that of a number like 111 or 112.
It was the only number that could not be dialled by accident by letting go of the dial too early. The aim wasn't to dial quickly, it was to avoid accidental calls.
Rotary dials in New Zealand were the other way around (sending ten minus the number dialled pulses) so the emergency number there was (and still is) 111 for the same reason: the hardest to dial by accident.
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#9999 was crappy design for "emergency" as, in the analog era, it would take almost 9x the time to dial it as that of a number like 111 or 112.
I was told it was selected because it can be dialed in the dark - just go all the way way with the rotor three times. I've always found that 999 sounds like an emergency, the biggest number. 112 seems absolutely arbitrary to me.
With 112 it sounds like 111 is where it's really at but we get the 112 service.
Re: 999: The world's oldest emergency services phone number
#10999 was crappy design for "emergency" as, in the analog era, it would take almost 9x the time to dial it as that of a number like 111 or 112.
I was told it was selected because it can be dialed in the dark - just go all the way way with the rotor three times. I've always found that 999 sounds like an emergency, the biggest number. 112 seems absolutely arbitrary to me.
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