In this article we're going to discuss the people responsible for what is now our emergency call system known as 911. Actually, the first system in being to dial in case of emergency was used in Great Britain in 1937. In Great Britain the citizens there could dial 999 to either call for the police, medical assistance or the fire department in case of fire. This could be done from anywhere in the country by anyone owning or leasing a standard telephone. No special equipment was needed. It wasn't until 1958 that the American Congress first investigated the possibility of a universal emergency number for the United States. Finally, in 1967, a legal mandate for this action was passed. The very first 911 call placed in the United States was on February 16, 1968 in Haleyville, Alabama made by the Alabama speaker of the house Rankin Fite. The call was answered by Congressman Tom Bevill. There was no actual emergency. The call was simply done as a test of the system itself. The difficulty in instituting the system was that the three numbers had to be three numbers that were not in use anywhere in the United States, neither as the first three digits of a phone number, nor as any of the individual states' area codes. This had to also be true for all phone numbers in Canada as well. On top of that, the numbers had to be easy to use and remember. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) along with American Telephone And Telegraph (AT&T), which had a monopoly on phone services at the time, announced plans to build the first 911 system in Huntington, Indiana. The President of Alabama Telephone, a man by the name of Bob Gallagher, was annoyed that the independent phone industry had not been informed of this decision and consulted as to their thoughts so he decided to get the jump on AT&T and built the first emergency service in Haleyville, Alabama. Gallagher got together with his state inside plant manager, Bob Fitzgerald, who told Gallagher that he could go ahead with his plans. Gallagher then quickly went to get approval from Continental Telephone and the commissioner of Alabama Public Service and then put out a press release on February 9 to announce that the Alabama phone company would be making history. Fitzgerald went ahead and looked at all 27 Alabama exchanges and chose the Haleyville location. He then engineered new circuitry and made the necessary modifications needed for the existing equipment. Fitzgerald and his whole team worked around the clock and got the new 911 system up and running in under a week. The team was actually doing double duty at the time, working their regular day jobs and then traveling to Haleyville at night to complete the project. They did this at off peak hours so as not to interfere with normal operations. The project was completed on February 16, 1968 at exactly 2 PM. Eye witness accounts of the event say that when the work was finally completed the whole work team shouted, in unison, "Bingo!". |
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