Photo from Ebay Area codes were assigned, in part, for ease of dialing on rotary phones like this one for people in the country’s most populated areas.

“The North American Numbering Plan (NANP) is an integrated telephone numbering plan serving 20 North American countries that share its resources. These countries include the United States and its territories, Canada, Bermuda, Anguilla, Antigua & Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Dominica, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Jamaica, Montserrat, Sint Maarten, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Trinidad and Tobago, and Turks & Caicos.”

That’s according to nationalnanpa.com, the entity that oversees the North American Numbering Plan.

We suspect we weren’t the only ones that had never heard of the NANP.

But a recent story Times Observer news writer Brian Ferry wrote spurred an interesting question — Where did area codes come from?

Well, the answer is the North American Numbering Plan.

Graphic from nationalnanpa.com Pennsylvania’s current area code map from nantionalnanpa.com.

The system dates to the 1940s and was developed by AT&T for the Bell telephone system.

Our area code — 814 — was part of that initial plan.

“AT&T developed the North American Numbering Plan in 1947 to simplify and facilitate direct dialing of long distance calls,” according to nationalnanpa.com. “Implementation of the plan began in 1951.”

The system as it existed before was reliant on operators to manually move calls across the system. Naturally, this limited the speed at which a call could be placed and the maximum call capacity of the system.

Articles from The Atlantic and from atlasobscura.com give us a pretty good idea what the intent of the plan originally was.

“From the earliest years of the telephony, advocates had called for an automated system of dialing-not just for reasons of privacy, but also for reasons of practicality,” The Atlantic explained. “Human operators may have added that friendly touch, but they were relatively inefficient; automated labor, it was clear, would scale much more readily than its human-conducted counterpart.”

The Anti-Digit Dialing League sprang up in opposition — arguing the numbers were too difficult were to remember and even cited a “creeping numeralism” in our society.

But the reality is that the League was wrong and the giant corporation was right.

“Engineers at Bell Labs designed the numbering scheme beginning in the early 1940s and working into the next decade. They took advantage, in that, of a supremely rare and an even more supremely geeky opportunity: To design a system, from scratch, that would ensure a maximum amount of efficiency for a maximum number of phone users. The area codes that lead our own phone numbers today-212, 202, 415-were direct results of their work,” according to The Atlantic article. “They were also based on a particular type of hardware: Rotary phones.”

The atlasobscura.com article gives us a closer look at how the system was to work.

“The real tell, in this sense, wasn’t the first number in the three-digit area code; it was the second. Initially, every area code installed had a second digit that was either a 0 or a 1. States with more than one area code generally had a 1 as a second digit (hence why New York City’s most common area code is 212), and states with a single area code generally had a 0 in the second digit (hence why Florida has the 305 area code).

“This is highlighted in terms of who got the most popular codes. For example, California initially got the area codes 916, 415, and 213. Los Angeles, of course, got the area code which required the fewest number of clicks on the analog dial. Chicago, likewise, got 312, and Detroit, 313. The largest and most prominent cities got the best codes, while smaller states had to drag the zero all the way around, almost as a punishment of sorts for not being bigger. But more importantly, it meant that the system was built with a degree of future-proofing. By leaving out numbers higher than 1 on the second digit, that meant that numerous area codes would be available in the decades to come, in case growth spurts hit and suddenly your state needs a lot of area codes.”

In the mobile world in which we live — and with traditional long-distance services largely a thing of the past — area codes have developed a cultural stigma as much as a practical one. If you’re from the “412,” you’re from Pittsburgh. The “216”? Cleveland.

That is, of course, until an area code runs out of number combinations.

Back in 2009, the PUC proposed to split 814 into two area codes but the plan was scuttled after strong public feedback.

When most households had one phone number, a single area code was enough to manage all the numbers. As the number of cell phones continues to boom, there just aren’t enough number combinations.

A year from now, everyone in the current 814 area code will have to dial all 10 digits, including the 814, to make local calls.

The Pennsylvania Public Utilities Commission announced that it was instituting changes to the area code over the next year. The writing has been on the wall for years. In 2011, the PUC held hearings, stating that it was expected the area code would run out of numbers in 2015.