History
The first 911 system was installed in Haleyville, Alabama, in February 1968 as a way to quickly connect a subscriber to the local police station. This system did not identify the caller but did provide a means to access emergency services that had not previously been available.
The Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999 standardized and mandated that 9,1,1 would be the digits to be dialed within the United States for "reporting an emergency to appropriate authorities and requesting assistance".
This system was quickly adapted and improved by other telephone companies to become the E911 system which provides both caller location and identification. A pioneering system was in place in Chicago by the mid-1970s, providing both police and fire departments access to the source location of emergency calls. Enhanced 911 is currently deployed in most metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada.
Read more about this topic: Enhanced 9-1-1
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Unfinished concepts that can never bring themselves to the point
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The thing that struck me forcefully was the feeling of great age about the place. Standing on that old parade ground, which is now a cricket field, I could feel the dead generations crowding me. Here was the oldest settlement of freedmen in the Western world, no doubt. Men who had thrown off the bands of slavery by their own courage and ingenuity. The courage and daring of the Maroons strike like a purple beam across the history of Jamaica.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)