A couple of years after my adventure with button B (click here to read this) things had already changed a lot. Though the ’phone booths remained the same, ‘subscriber trunk dialling’ had been introduced, enabling one to make a trunk call, or even an international call, without going through an operator, even from a public call box. Somehow, I discovered that there was a free speaking clock at Crans-sur-Sierre in Switzerland. It seemed a very long number at the time.
I think that there had been long debates in early telephony about how many digits people could easily remember, and that this led in Britain and elsewhere to alphabetic exchange names followed by some digits. This enabled clever companies to get good numbers. For instance, instead of remembering RENown (the name of the Fulham exchange in London) and the four digit number 2858, you could just dial RENAULT to get through to their garage. But I remember the delight I felt at being able to dial Switzerland free from a public call box in Oxford to hear the time in Switzerland, and in French. I memorized the number, and for a while regularly called it, though it was not really of use, for sheer pleasure at what new technologies were making possible.