The year was 1960, and phones were changing. It was the beginning of the end for rotary dialling, and buttons were the future. But engineers faced an important, looming question: what order do you put those buttons in?
Turns out there were a lot of options.
Note: A lot of these are super wrong. What they hell were they thinking?
Before ultimately settling on the layout we know and love today, the brainiacs at Bell Labs ran tests with hundreds of dialers, keeping close watch on what layouts were the speediest, most accurate, and most preferred.
In the end though, there wasn’t much of a difference between the front-runners, and we wound up with the pattern we have today largely for technical, button-spacing reasons. And though it may seem second nature today, it certainly wasn’t just a matter of luck.
If you want to know more about the history, you can check out the entire report online, or you can watch Numberphile’s handy little summary below. And next time you dial a number, remember you’re dealing with some seriously tested tech. [Numberphile]