First U.S. 911 Emergency Call
On this day · 16 February 1968
In a small Alabama town, a bright red telephone rang and launched the emergency number that now answers hundreds of millions of calls a year.
On February 16, 1968, the United States placed its first-ever 911 emergency call in Haleyville, Alabama. At around 2 p.m., Alabama state representative Rankin Fite dialed the three digits from the mayor’s office, and U.S. Representative Tom Bevill answered on a bright red telephone at the Haleyville police station.
The call was no accident. After a 1957 recommendation and years of study, the FCC and AT&T had announced in January 1968 that 9-1-1 would become the nation’s universal emergency number, chosen because it was short, easy to remember, and unused as an area or exchange code. Rather than wait for the giant Bell System, Bob Gallagher of the independent Alabama Telephone Company raced to build a working system first.
A number anyone could dial, anywhere, replaced a confusing tangle of local seven-digit lines.
That single test call seeded a network that today fields well over 200 million emergency calls a year. The original red phone is preserved as a museum piece, a quiet monument to a deceptively simple idea.
Sources & references
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