What was the reason for New Zealand's reversed numbering on rotary dials?

Forums › ICT Policies and Regulation › What was the reason for New Zealand's reversed numbering on rotary dials?

1 | 2

old3eyes

9120 posts

Uber Geek

Subscriber

#1743726 19-Mar-2017 09:53

Below is based on discussions I had when my dimensional engineer Graham Honoray (not sure of correct name spelling) when I worked in Telephone Equipment Section in Wellington between 1973 and 1978.

It was indeed to do with the 7A rotary gear that was installed in NZ after WW1 and I suspect that it was the way that Western Electric Europe did things and we just followed. Back in the late 1950s the question of standardizing the dials came up again as the Western electric rotary areas were reverse but all the Ericson Rotary and Step offices were standard dial. The decision made by POHQ in Wellington was basically "Whats good for Wellington was good for the country" so hence the standard areas were converted to reverse dial. My DE did admit that this was a big mistake. Back in the early 1970s it was looked at again and I remember seeing test standard dial overlays that were to be sent out to customers when the new phone books were to be released in an area by area and the dials and numbering plan would be changed to standard as we didn't have long distant dialing then. It was killed off by the bean counters in POHQ and after toll dialing came about it was then too late. With DTMF dialing it became a non issue except for the PBX area that still insisted (Telecom) that dial 1 was trunk access. The rest of the world except for Australia used dial 9 and AU use dial 0 for trunk access.

Regards,

Old3eyes

mugs2000

66 posts

Master Geek
Inactive user

#1743751 19-Mar-2017 11:29

In about 1952, our phone number was changed from 22322 to 88788 in South Dunedin when a P&T lineman changed the dial label to make it a reverse dial.

SepticSceptic

2191 posts

Uber Geek

Trusted

#1744400 20-Mar-2017 12:01

Reverse numbering made it a bit harder to tappity-tap-tap the pay phones .... had to subtract from 10 on the fly ...

Get it wrong, and you could have some interesting conversations ...

mugs2000

66 posts

Master Geek
Inactive user

#1744415 20-Mar-2017 12:25

SepticSceptic:

Reverse numbering made it a bit harder to tappity-tap-tap the pay phones .... had to subtract from 10 on the fly ...

Get it wrong, and you could have some interesting conversations ...

That wasn't too hard compared to what one of the PO techs could do; he could whistle the AC2 tones into a toll line to make a free toll call. More often than not he would get a wrong number.

nathan

5695 posts

Uber Geek
Inactive user

#1744417 20-Mar-2017 12:27

SepticSceptic:
Reverse numbering made it a bit harder to tappity-tap-tap the pay phones .... had to subtract from 10 on the fly ...

Get it wrong, and you could have some interesting conversations ...

I remember those days well as a kid making free payphone calls :)

Bung

6487 posts

Uber Geek

Subscriber

#1744457 20-Mar-2017 12:47

old3eyes:
Below is based on discussions I had when my dimensional engineer Graham Honoray (not sure of correct name spelling) when I worked in Telephone Equipment Section in Wellington between 1973 and 1978.

It was indeed to do with the 7A rotary gear that was installed in NZ after WW1 and I suspect that it was the way that Western Electric Europe did things and we just followed. Back in the late 1950s the question of standardizing the dials came up again as the Western electric rotary areas were reverse but all the Ericson Rotary and Step offices were standard dial. The decision made by POHQ in Wellington was basically "Whats good for Wellington was good for the country" so hence the standard areas were converted to reverse dial. My DE did admit that this was a big mistake. Back in the early 1970s it was looked at again and I remember seeing test standard dial overlays that were to be sent out to customers when the new phone books were to be released in an area by area and the dials and numbering plan would be changed to standard as we didn't have long distant dialing then. It was killed off by the bean counters in POHQ and after toll dialing came about it was then too late. With DTMF dialing it became a non issue except for the PBX area that still insisted (Telecom) that dial 1 was trunk access. The rest of the world except for Australia used dial 9 and AU use dial 0 for trunk access.

IIRC it was Honore. I started working for John Andrew in 77 so we must have met.

From http://www.telephonetribute.com/gte_ae_page.html

"Why did Western Electric not take a license and manufacture the Automatic Electric dial when the Bell System finally decided that if they were going to survive, they would have to eat crow and start installing Automatic equipment and abandon their "not-invented-here" mentality of opposition to automatic dial telephone service? They did some strange things to make their first dials look different so they would not be accused of plagiarizing the Automatic Electric design. First of all, their early dials, made and sold in Europe with the first Rotary systems made there by International Western Electric, had the finger stop in the 7 o'clock position. Then they started numbering the dials backwards, with the 9 where the 1 is, 8 where the 2 is, The numbering, starting with the first hole, was 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and 0. They finally settled for the finger stop in the 3 o'clock position rather than in the standard Automatic Electric 5 o'clock position. Why? Just to be different and not to be seen as copying Automatic Electric. Those backwards-numbered dials actually became the standards in New Zealand and Norway where the first Rotary Systems became their national switching system. When DTMF (Touch Tone in Bell's copyrighted terminology) arrived some 50 years later, those countries were still using backwards dials. If you dialed 1 it put out 9 pulses. Only the number of pulses with the 5 and the 0 were the same as the as the Automatic Electric dial. That design was soon abandoned, but not until Norway and New Zealand had made it their national standard for many years to come. There was absolutely no technical reason for the backwards-numbered dial. It was only to be different."

nzkiwis

2 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1744610 20-Mar-2017 16:09

I totally disagree that there was no technical reason for the reverse 7001 dial being used with the 7A Rotary machine switching system. Strowger attempted to replicate the actions of a manual switchboard operator, through direct control. Frank Mcberty made no attempt to do the same, he opted for the reverse dial because the 7A Rotary system was common control, where the digits dialled (compliment of 10) were recorded on register digit recorders, and were unloaded by revertive pulses being returned from the selectors. For example; if a 6 was dialled, 4 pulses were received by the register recorder and it rotated to position 4, it then took 6 revertive pulses to unload the register digit recorder, to rotate it to its home position. When counting subscriber's numbers; for example from 70,000 to 70,099, the first number is naturally 70,000 followed numerically through to 70,099 and were allocated to the first half of the final selector arc, 70,100 through to 70,199 were allocated to the second half of the arc (e.g. Auckland and Wellington 7A Rotary exchanges). While I will admit that this could be achieved using the standard dial, the circuitry deviated form the logical, because aditional pulses had to be recorded by the register digit recorders prior to dial tone being returned to the calling subscriber, as well as register modifications to achieve correct digital pairing for the final selector (e.g. Christchurch and Dunedin 7A Rotary exchanges).

With 7A Rotary semi-automatic exchanges, there were no dials. When the subscriber lifted their receiver they were automatically connected to a free operator, who through the use of numerically numbered push buttons completed the conection through the 7A Rotary switching system.

1 | 2