It’s rumored that phone companies then decided to reverse the layout to “confuse” people, allowing them to take more time to dial the number correctly, giving the telephone enough time to register the number dialed. The touch-tone phone, however, couldn’t operate at those speeds and would often end up missing a number or two if you dialed too fast. Data-entry professionals using these calculators had gotten into the habit of crunching numbers at incredible speeds. The calculator was invented long before the touch-tone telephone and was used for data-entry. The second theory also seems interesting because it talks about creating two separate counter-intuitive, reversed layouts on purpose. Dialing a 0 would create 10 disconnections in the loop, so what looked like a 0 was actually a 10, if you count the number of disconnections. The telephone exchange (or the central office) could ‘read’ these disconnections and step the electro-magnetic mechanical switches that then connected you to the number you dialed. Dialing a 1 creating one disconnection, dialing 2 created two disconnections in the loop.
#Phone keypad layout series
Every time you dialed a number, it produced a series of quick disconnections in the ‘loop’ just milliseconds long. When you lifted the receiver off the phone, it would instantly create a loop-signal. *In the days of rotary dial telephones, the pulse signaling system was known as ‘loop-disconnect’. The calculator simply followed this functional format.Ī rotary telephone and a calculator (or an adding-machine) So the 1 and 2 were placed immediately above the 0, making the cash register easier to operate. Having currencies with the denominations 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 etc, it also made more sense to keep these lower numbers towards the base too. The 0 was placed intentionally at the bottom of cash registers because with the currencies that were used, the 0 was pressed much more often than any key, so it made sense to keep it within hands reach.
The keypad’s layout wasn’t an evolutionary one (like the telephone), but a functional one.
The design of the calculator was based on that of the cash register. The calculator, on the other hand, had been designed long before the modern phone, and used a format with 789 at the top. They followed the standard 3×3 matrix to arrange the 1 to 9 (arranged from left to right), putting the 0 at the bottom, between the * and #. With the advent of touch-tone hardware in the 50s, companies decided to stick roughly to the current layout, having the 1 at the starting, and the 9 and 0 (or ten, as they called it) at the end. Long before the modern day touch-tone phone, we were used to the rotary phone, which arranged the numbers from 1 to 0 on a circular dial that you’d rotate (the zero was actually treated as a 10. The reason the two keypads have different layouts today is that back when they were first invented, they were two completely different products, using different technologies, and served different purposes. My favorite theory takes us on a time-traveling trip. There’s no fixed reason for the difference in layout, but there seem to be a few interesting theories to define exactly how we arrived at this bizarre placement. It’s always bewildered me that we’ve had these two separate systems for separate machines, even today. The zero or the lowest value sits at the bottom and it increments moving upwards, ending with nine right at the top. Phone dialers and ATM machines have it starting at the top with 1, going down to 9, and ending with a 0 at the base, sitting between the asterisk and the hashtag but you look at the calculator, the cash register, or the computer’s number pad and it’s the other way around. The numbers, for obvious reasons, are the same… but the layouts aren’t. You’ll see it on the right of your keyboard on your computer (if you’ve got a numpad), and you’ll see it in your ATM machines, cash registers, card readers, security systems, and if you’ve still got one, your landline phone. You see it everywhere, from your dialer, to your calculator, and your phone’s unlock screen. Take into account all the places that utilize the number pad and you’ll notice a disparity that’s quite odd but humanity seems to have made peace with.
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