999

This is interesting. I spotted it over at Bogdana's blog, which really should be called Blogdana. I'm not really sure why it's interesting, so here's some randomish thoughts.

1. I thought they'd be more 999's. Don't you find that a little unusual? Many countries borrow stuff from Britain because of the Colonial legacy, so I thought there would be more 999's. Maybe that's because the telephone became ubiquitous after the Empire had ended?

2. There's a lot of 9's and 1's. Blogdana makes a good point that, thanks to Hollywood, almost everyone would know the emergency number in America.

3. I was always under the impression that in Britain the number is 999 because in the old days when phones looked like this

(Picture taken from Vintagephone.com with thanks, usual stuff applies.)

three 9's would have been really hard to dial by accident. That means that pesky kids couldn't call an ambulance by mistake. So how is that relevant in the mobile world?

4. Why isn't the emergency number the same all over the world?

Comments

[mike]

actually there is a bunch of emergency numbers in Russia and ex-USSR countries. In case of fire you have to call 01, then 02 is for police and 03 is for ambulance. then 04 is a service number of Gas supplying dept. this days Russia going to change all emergency numbers to 112 (cellphone-like) or 911.

[Emily]

999 is pretty funny for a rotary phone emergency number. You'd have to hope you weren't bleeding too fast while you waited for the little hole to make its way round the dial.

[Gnu Zealand]

For what it's worth, there actually is another 999 on your list, following the British system, in New Zealand.

Except that our first automatic exchange was a patent-breaker (in Oamaru) and had the numbers on the rotary dial in mostly reversed order. Zero at the longest digit (ten pulses), one next (nine pulses), then two, and so on up to nine, being the shortest (one pulse).

Therefore 1-1-1 in NZ is identical to 9-9-9 in the UK.

Regards.