If I were alive in 1954, I would understand why I would need a movie to figure this “dialing” thing out.
The movie from “the telephone company” emphasizes that you MUST bring your finger all the way to the finger stop when dialing the two letters and five numbers to talk to another person on the phone.
Here’s the movie.
Was this truly an improvement over the old system, in which you simply spoke the number to your friendly operator?
Probably not…but as phones became more useful, the old system wouldn’t have enough operators in 1954. Already there were 51 million phones in the United States; what if that number doubled?
And yes, that number did double…in 1967.
With some of those 100 million users dialing phone numbers WITHOUT worrying about the finger stop, as touch tone phones were introduced in 1963, supported by a new underlying technology dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF).
And…well, a lot of other stuff happened.
In 2026 some of us don’t dial at all. We just say “Call Mom” to our non-human “operator” on our smartphones.
And many of the operators are out of a job.
Bredemarket 