And in the 1950s, some cities (notably Miami) had installed single-use physical telephones on city streets so that people could talk directly to the fire department if an emergency hit. A 1920 article in the Quarterly of the National Fire Protection Association, for example, highlighted a debate over whether to replace telegraph alarms with telephone alarms. The fire industry had long been debating the issues of how the telephone system would work during emergencies-in part because fire alarms relied on the system. So why was this not the case for the United States? Simply, the ball hadn't rolled quickly enough in that general direction. The system, run by the post office, largely did what it was supposed to. The United Kingdom, which had three-digit emergency number in London as early as 1937-999, to be exact-had a much easier time making the whole thing work. But the situation raised an incredibly obvious question for her: "Would it not be possible to cut out the operator stage by dialing directly some prearranged emergency number?" "The reason it seemed so long to me was that I discovered the time I had wasted in telephoning was just enough to prevent my getting out of the apartment, as the hall was impassable due to smoke," she recalled.Ĭlearly, she survived. In a New York Times letter to the editor, she noted that the awkwardness of the system had put her in danger. That did not work very well being someone who lives in the busiest city in the country, she was forced to compete with every other person dialing the operator at the time, meaning she kept getting dropped lines. But she dialed the easiest number she knew: 0, for operator. In 1958, a New York City woman named Rosamund Reinhardt pointed out the severity of the problem when she attempted to call in a fire at a nearby apartment. One example I spotted from a 1946 Washington Post article describing a woman whose apartment was on fire highlights the rigamarole of pre-911 emergency calls: "he tried vainly to reach an operator by dialing the emergency number '311.' In her excitement she forgot the fire control center's number, Union 1122." Now just imagine the problems that patchwork of municipalities created in the days before 911. The reason for this is a basic functional difference: Because EveryBlock relies on public data acquired from municipalities, it has to theoretically make deals with every single city in the country, which limits its scale. A great way to think about this is with a modern-day example: The neighborhood-based online service EveryBlock is only in a few cities, while the much larger NextDoor is pretty much everywhere. A 1921 article from Public Service magazine highlights the complexities of the situation, noting that New York City's Bellevue Hospital was fielding as many as 2,500 emergency calls per day.Īnd every city and municipality is different.
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And getting them all on the same page with something as simple as an emergency code is really friggin' hard.īut clearly there was some need for such a system, because people were calling random places to get emergency service.
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The thing about the United States is that it's big, laid out confusingly, and full of municipalities big and small. But it wouldn't have existed had it not been for the hard work that went into the 911 system less than two decades before. Sometimes the stories are relatively minor emergencies sometimes, they're a matter of life and death. But the thing that was great about this show is that it seemed to celebrate heroism rather than focus on villains, a rarity for this era of reality television. Part of this is my age-I grew up during a period when I would regularly see a show like this on CBS, and Star Trek meant Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the United Federation of Planets ( 'cause he won't speak English anyway). Of all the things William Shatner has done in his career-captain of the starship Enterprise, veteran police officer, totally-game muse for Ben Folds, fairly good tweeter for being 86 years old-the one thing that's stuck with me the most is his years on Rescue 911, the early reality show that was America's Most Wanted (mostly) without the crime and Unsolved Mysteries with the solutions laid out clear as day. A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, a twice-weekly newsletter that hunts for the end of the long tail.