Phone words

I recently bought a copy of Los Alamos Rolodex, a book displaying business cards from Los Alamos Nation Labs from 1967 to 1978. You can find some examples of the cards here. One of the cards in the book is for Eugene Frank, President of B & F Instruments. His card lists his phone number as (215) MErcury 9-7100 At first glance I thought the “E” in “MErcury” had been accidentally capitalized. Then I realized the intention was that someone would dial ME (i.e. 63) and ingore “rcury”. So the phone number would be (215) 639-7100. This card was from 1968, the height of the space race. Presumably the card was alluding to the Project Mercury or the planet Mercury, or both. The telephone keypad mapping (ITU E.161 standard) is a poor attempt at making phone numbers more memorable. For starters, there’s no way to encode 0 or 1. It’s unlikely a phone number will correspond to anything memorable unless you come up with the word first and then try to obtain the phone number, such as 800 FLOWERS.…