Telephone keypad

A telephone keypad is the keypad installed on a push-button telephone or similar telecommunication device for dialing a telephone number. It was standardized when the dual-tone multi-frequency signaling (DTMF) system was developed in the Bell System in the United States in the 1960s that replaced rotary dialing originally developed in electromechanical switching systems. Because of the installed abundance of rotary dial equipment well into the 1990s, many telephone keypads were also designed to produce loop-disconnect pulses electronically, and some could be optionally switched to produce either DTMF or pulses.

The development of the modern telephone keypad is attributed to research in the 1950s by Richard Deininger under the directorship of John Karlin at the Human Factors Engineering Department of Bell Labs. The contemporary keypad is laid out in a rectangular array of twelve push buttons arranged as four rows and three columns of keys. For military applications, a fourth, right-most column of keys was added for priority signaling in the Autovon system in the 1960s. Initially, between 1963 and 1968, the keypads for civilian subscriber service had keys installed in only ten positions, omitting the lower left and lower right keys that commonly are assigned to the star (✻) and number sign (#) signals, respectively. These keys were added to provide signals for anticipated data entry purposes in business applications, but found use in Custom Calling Services (CLASS) features installed in electronic switching systems.

The layout of the digit keys is different from that commonly appearing on calculators and numeric keypads. This layout was chosen after extensive human factors testing at Bell Labs. At the time (late 1950s), mechanical calculators were not widespread, and few people had experience with them. Indeed, calculators were only just starting to settle on a common layout; a 1955 paper states "Of the several calculating devices we have been able to look at... Two other calculators have keysets resembling [the layout that would become the most common layout].... Most other calculators have their keys reading upward in vertical rows of ten," while a 1960 paper, just five years later, refers to today's common calculator layout as "the arrangement frequently found in ten-key adding machines". In any case, Bell Labs testing found that the telephone layout with 1, 2, and 3 in the top row, was slightly faster than the calculator layout with them in the bottom row.

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