In what year did the Bell System first make the push-button, “touch-tone” telephone commercially available?

By 1960, the development of transistors had made push-button technology practical enough to use for routing telephone calls. After a few years of field testing, the Bell System first made push-button dialing available to customers. Bell partially equipped its central office in Findlay, Ohio with machinery to register the tones made by touch-tone phones. This first commercially available service started on 11/1/60.

In the early 1940's, Western Electric first experimented with using pairs of tones to route phone calls. Mechanical reeds were used to produce two tones for each digit, 0 through 9. A system was tested later in the decade and abandoned as unreliable.

Push-buttons for telephoning were introduced in 1887, but not for automatic dialing. In 1891, Almon Brown Strowger invented the rotary dial, which slowly replaced manual “switching” performed by operators at local switchboard hubs.

In 1962, touch-tone phones were on display at the Seattle World’s Fair. On 4/22/63, President John F. Kennedy keyed the digits “1964” into a touch-tone phone in the Oval Office, launching a second-to-second countdown to the 1964 New York World’s Fair.

On 11/18/63, Bell officially introduced its “dual-tone multi-frequency” system bearing the Touch Tone trademark. By the 1990's, most landline customers had switched from rotary dialing to push-button telephony.