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999 (emergency telephone number)
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999 (emergency telephone number)
999 is an official emergency telephone number in a number of countries and allows the caller to contact emergency services for assistance. Countries and territories using the number include Bahrain, Bangladesh, Botswana, the Cook Islands, Eswatini, Ghana, Guernsey, Hong Kong, the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Kenya, Macau, Malaysia, Mauritius, Niue, Poland, Qatar, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago, Seychelles, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe.
999 is the official emergency services number for the United Kingdom, but calls are also accepted on the European Union emergency number, 112. All calls are answered by 999 operators and are always free. Approximately 35 million 999/112 calls are made in the UK each year, with 74% from mobiles and 26% from landlines in 2022.
In the United Kingdom there are four emergency services, which maintain full-time emergency control centres (ECC), to which 999 emergency calls may be routed direct by emergency operators in telephone company operator assistance centres (OAC). These services are as follows, listed in the order of percentage of calls received:
Other emergency services may also be reached through the 999 system but do not maintain permanent emergency control centres. All of these emergency services are summoned through the ECC of one of the four principal services listed above:
First introduced in the London area on 30 June 1937, the UK's 999 number is the world's oldest emergency call telephone service. The system was introduced following a house fire in Wimpole Street on 10 November 1935, in which five women were killed. A neighbour had tried to telephone the fire brigade and was so outraged at being held in a queue by the Welbeck telephone exchange that he wrote a letter to the editor of The Times, which prompted a government inquiry. Days after the service launched, a Hampstead woman made its first call, which resulted in burglar Thomas Duffy being caught in the act while raiding a house.
The initial scheme covered a 12-mile (19 km) radius around Oxford Circus and the public were advised use it only in an ongoing emergency if "for instance, the man in the flat next to yours is murdering his wife or you have seen a heavily masked cat burglar peering round the stack pipe of the local bank building." The first arrest – for burglary – took place a week later and the scheme was extended to major cities after World War II and then to the whole of the UK in 1976.
The 9-9-9 format was chosen based on the 'button A' and 'button B' design of pre-payment coin-operated public payphones in wide use (first introduced in 1925), which could be easily modified to allow free use of the 9 digit on the rotary dial in addition to the 0 digit (then used to call the operator), without allowing free use of numbers involving other digits; other combinations of free call 9 and 0 were later used for more purposes, including multiples of 9 (to access exchanges before subscriber trunk dialling came into use) as a fail-safe for attempted emergency calls, e.g. 9 or 99, reaching at least an operator.
The choice of 999 was fortunate for accessibility, because in the dark or in dense smoke 999 could be dialled by placing a finger one hole away from the dial stop (see the articles on rotary dial and GPO telephones) and rotating the dial to the full extent three times. This enabled all users including the visually impaired to dial the emergency number easily. It is also the case that it is relatively easy for 111, and other low-number sequences, to be called accidentally, including when transmission wires making momentary contact produce a pulse similar to dialling (e.g. when overhead cables touch in high winds).
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999 (emergency telephone number)
999 is an official emergency telephone number in a number of countries and allows the caller to contact emergency services for assistance. Countries and territories using the number include Bahrain, Bangladesh, Botswana, the Cook Islands, Eswatini, Ghana, Guernsey, Hong Kong, the Republic of Ireland, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Kenya, Macau, Malaysia, Mauritius, Niue, Poland, Qatar, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Trinidad and Tobago, Seychelles, Uganda, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, and Zimbabwe.
999 is the official emergency services number for the United Kingdom, but calls are also accepted on the European Union emergency number, 112. All calls are answered by 999 operators and are always free. Approximately 35 million 999/112 calls are made in the UK each year, with 74% from mobiles and 26% from landlines in 2022.
In the United Kingdom there are four emergency services, which maintain full-time emergency control centres (ECC), to which 999 emergency calls may be routed direct by emergency operators in telephone company operator assistance centres (OAC). These services are as follows, listed in the order of percentage of calls received:
Other emergency services may also be reached through the 999 system but do not maintain permanent emergency control centres. All of these emergency services are summoned through the ECC of one of the four principal services listed above:
First introduced in the London area on 30 June 1937, the UK's 999 number is the world's oldest emergency call telephone service. The system was introduced following a house fire in Wimpole Street on 10 November 1935, in which five women were killed. A neighbour had tried to telephone the fire brigade and was so outraged at being held in a queue by the Welbeck telephone exchange that he wrote a letter to the editor of The Times, which prompted a government inquiry. Days after the service launched, a Hampstead woman made its first call, which resulted in burglar Thomas Duffy being caught in the act while raiding a house.
The initial scheme covered a 12-mile (19 km) radius around Oxford Circus and the public were advised use it only in an ongoing emergency if "for instance, the man in the flat next to yours is murdering his wife or you have seen a heavily masked cat burglar peering round the stack pipe of the local bank building." The first arrest – for burglary – took place a week later and the scheme was extended to major cities after World War II and then to the whole of the UK in 1976.
The 9-9-9 format was chosen based on the 'button A' and 'button B' design of pre-payment coin-operated public payphones in wide use (first introduced in 1925), which could be easily modified to allow free use of the 9 digit on the rotary dial in addition to the 0 digit (then used to call the operator), without allowing free use of numbers involving other digits; other combinations of free call 9 and 0 were later used for more purposes, including multiples of 9 (to access exchanges before subscriber trunk dialling came into use) as a fail-safe for attempted emergency calls, e.g. 9 or 99, reaching at least an operator.
The choice of 999 was fortunate for accessibility, because in the dark or in dense smoke 999 could be dialled by placing a finger one hole away from the dial stop (see the articles on rotary dial and GPO telephones) and rotating the dial to the full extent three times. This enabled all users including the visually impaired to dial the emergency number easily. It is also the case that it is relatively easy for 111, and other low-number sequences, to be called accidentally, including when transmission wires making momentary contact produce a pulse similar to dialling (e.g. when overhead cables touch in high winds).
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