It may be hard to imagine, in our current era when landlines are disappearing altogether, that there was a time when telephone connections were made by operators, not by the callers. Old television shows from the 1950s demonstrated how it worked — pick up the receiver, and tell the operator on the other side of the line the number of your other party. Then wait until the call is patched through. The technology for direct, operator-less, connections existed from the 1930s, and was finally made viable by the start of the ’50s.

On this day, November 10, in 1951, the first official Direct Distance Dialing call took place, between the mayors of Englewood, New Jersey and Alameda, California.

The line connection was established within a matter of seconds — a considerable improvement on the first operator-assisted coast-to-coast connection that spanned five operators and nearly half an hour of set-up time. The two mayors on direct dial, on opposite sides of the country, chatted for just 18 seconds, but the stage was set for the growth of direct-dial connections. Soon, telephone numbers were prefixed with three-digit “area codes,” and customers were able to dial their party directly, although several remote parts of the country retained switchboards into the 1980s.