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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of literature—take the net result of Tiraboshi, Warton, or Schlegel,—is a sum of a very few ideas, and of very few original tales,—all the rest being variation of these.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)