I started thinking about area codes today when I was looking at my Snapchat contacts, and noticing how many people use their area codes as part of their user names. In part that’s intuitive because Snapchat is an app you use on your phone, but people identify with their area codes in other ways as well: putting them on shirts, mugs, and tattoos. (There must be someone who put his or her area code on a tombstone, but all I could find by Googling was a grave with a QR code.)

I then didactically told my girlfriend (who hadn’t asked for an early-morning history lesson) what I thought was the story of area codes: when area codes were first assigned, phone dialing technology consisted of literal dials—and the higher a number was, the longer you had to have your finger in the dial. To maximize efficiency on a national level, the powers that be assigned the low-digit area codes to the densely populated areas out east, and worked their way west, with the more remove provinces of the nation getting the more time-intensive high-digit area codes. Thus it is, I explained, that New York gets the choice 212 area code while Minneapolis gets stuck with 612.

I was so pleased with my fascinating nugget of media history that I thought I’d take the next step and share it with the entire dozen-strong Sunday morning readership of The Tangential. This time, though, I actually did some research—and whoops, I was way wrong about the whole stigmatized-digit thing. Well, not entirely wrong—but pretty wrong.

Here’s the actual story: for the first several decades of telephone service, phones were connected via regional exchanges. These were the quaint days of telephony, when your phone number had a word in it: the name of your local exchange. If you lived in Minneapolis, for example, your phone number might be PArkway 12345 or NIcollet 67890. (It turns out to be surprisingly hard to figure out what your exact exchange name would have been back in the day based on where you live now.) The first two letters of your exchange name were capitalized because those were effectively the first two digits of your number, and you’d use the same letter-number correspondence system that’s still on your smartphone to translate the letters into digits.

That system, allowing you to direct-dial a number in your area, was an advance over earlier systems that required an operator to connect every single call—but you still needed an operator’s help to make a long-distance call. To eliminate that step, in 1947, AT&T and Bell rolled out the North American Numbering Plan: the first area codes as we know them.

To avoid confusion with local exchange codes, which always had a digit 2-9 in the second position, area codes were initially designed to always have either a zero or a one in the second position. If your state had only one area code, you’d just have the code with the zero in the middle—so all of South Dakota, for example, was area code 605. If your state was big enough to require multiple area codes, they’d have a one in the middle to indicate that your state had been subdivided—so Minnesota, for example, had 218 to cover most of the state’s geography, and 612 for the more populous southeastern corner including the Twin Cities.

So the story’s a little more complex than I thought it was. Here’s the germ of truth in my story: the most densely populated areas did get lower-digit area codes, but they weren’t distributed in a straightforward east-to-west progression, they were distributed in order of population. New York did get 212 because it was the Big Apple, but then 213 went to Los Angeles. The big cities in the Heartland weren’t ignored: Chicago got 312, and Detroit scooped 313. Still, Minneapolis and St. Paul had to live with that tedious six—but we did better than Sacramento, which got the highest of the original 86 area codes: the epic nine-one-six.

Amazingly, it wasn’t until 1995 that area codes with digits other than zero and one in the central position were finally rolled out: the first two of these radical area codes were 334 (southeastern Alabama) and 360 (western Washington state). Around that time, as area codes started to overlap, cities started to require the use of area codes—so you couldn’t just dial a local number with the seven digits any more. The first city to require ten-digit dialing wasn’t even New York: it was Atlanta, around the time of the 1996 Summer Olympics.

Okay, so now when it comes to area codes, I finally know my fucking history.

– Jay Gabler