We have been using both our phones and calculators for years, but there is a strange thing that few of us may have noticed. The numbers on a calculator go up as the sequence progresses, while it is the other way around on a phone. If you haven't noticed it yet, check it out now. But do you know why?
Paul Stockley, who works in the telecommunications industry, has the answer you need. He says that the reverse order of numbers on a phone has nothing to do with aesthetics or usability, but has persisted over the years because of the "zero.".
He says that phones never really had a "zero.".
The "0" on the rotary dial telephone wasn't zero, it was ten. And it's in the "ten" position, after "nine." For phones with keypads, it's still after "nine" to this day.
The designers of calculators corrected this. They put the 0 in its natural place. It is below the "1", both numerically and physically.
Phones were left with what they already had and had to keep it or abandon the alphabet mapping in its then-current form: “A” was on “2” and “Z” on “9.” To rearrange the numbers they would have to reverse the alphabet, a not-so-easy task, we might say, when the calculator designers chose to reverse the numerical order.
In the days of rotary dials the signaling system was known as either "disconnect loop" or "decimal" signaling.
So technically speaking, there was never a 0 on the phone. It wasn't even a design decision, it was dictated by engineers and later established by the overlapping of the alphabet. And that's why we still have phones with a "0" in place of a "ten.".
We hope you found the answer to why numbers go up on a phone line and vice versa on a laptop. We hope some phone company will rethink this and start manufacturing new phones with numbers going up.
