Muncie and Indiana telephone directories

The first operational telephone was invented in 1876 and the first telephone exchange was established in New Haven, Connecticut two years later in 1878. In November of that year, a directory was issued for the exchange. Telephone service and coverage steadily spread throughout the nation and by the turn of the century, over a million telephones were in service in the United States. The expansion in telephone use resulted in the production of a growing number of telephone directories. The earliest telephone directories did not include numbers, but rather listed homes and businesses with a telephone. As the number of telephone exchanges grew, the telephone exchange name system, which relied upon the abbreviated exchange names as the leading component in unique phone numbers, emerged. The current all-number calling system represented in telephone directories was not established until the late 1950s.