I wonder if he's responsible for the difference between a phone keypad (123 on the top row) and a telephone keypad (789).

Oops. For that second keypad I should have written "calculator" instead of "telephone".

Allan, my "dad" sent me this when I sent him that obit:

I have to admit that I am still disappointed that he did not go with the "calculator" layout.  I could touch type calculators and adding machines without looking at the keys, something I have never been able to do with phones. The calculator layout is still the one used on computer keyboards, and I really wonder if Bell didn't choose the reverse layout "just because they could."  True story:  When the world was moving to touch tones rather than dials, the Europeans and Japan (ITU)  had settled on a particular set of frequencies that was different, more reliable, and simpler to generate than what ATT/Bell was proposing.  Bells response was, "We have over half the world's telephones on our system, so you can adopt our plan or be incompatible."  Note: this was before any touch tone phones had ever been put into service outside of a laboratory

Bell did not want the key pad the same as a calculator. Their early systems could not keep up with speed of a person using a calculator by touch.

TR, I wondered whether this was a qwerty thing (purposeful use of inferior arrangement to insert just enough friction to allow the technology to keep up with the user) ... Do you have a source for that?

What's a telephone?

I have a unique early Western Electric Bell telephone: a touch tone phone with an auto-dialer.

It uses plastic punch cards that you insert into a slot above the keypad array. After inserting the card into the spring loaded slot, you press a release that slowly ejects the card, and the holes in the card close switches to generate the touch tones for each desired number.

http://www.paul-f.com/we/we1660exc.jpg

Those were the days.

Speaking of technological paradoxes

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqio-PxEjHc&feature=youtube_gdata_player

There are some of us who can remember phones before rotary dials and a time when it took about 20 minutes to get a coast to coast long distance connection.

In the late 1960s Allan Sherman lightheartedly complained about Mr. Karlin's project to convert to all-digit dialing in his song "Let's All Call up AT&T And Protest to the President March." I remember this unintentionally prophetic bit:
"So protest / do your best
Let us show him that we march in unity.
If he won't / change the rules
Let's take our business to another phone company!" Mr. Sherman would never have dreamed that 10 years after he died, AT&T would be broken up.