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SALT LAKE CITY — Tuesday isn’t only the start of August, but it’s also a sort of holiday in parts of Utah.
Aug. 1 is referred to as “801 Day” because of how it appears on the calendar, and the number 801 has been synonymous with Utah for more than 70 years now, dating all the way back to the creation of area codes.
To celebrate the date Tuesday, the Salt Lake City Downtown Alliance and Visit Salt Lake are hosting various events and offering discounts in downtown Salt Lake City.
“I encourage residents, community organizations and businesses to join in the celebration and demonstrate their pride for our city,” said Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall in a statement. “I further urge residents and visitors to take this opportunity to explore the unique neighborhoods and support local restaurants, bars and shops in ‘the 801.'”
That made us wonder: How did Utah — and the Wasatch Front specifically — end up with this number?
The need for area codes
Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, and it slowly but surely took over as the primary means of communication over time. Bell made the first transcontinental telephone call in 1915, placing a call in New York City to Thomas Watson in San Francisco — the same man who answered the first phone call nearly 40 years earlier.
Phone numbers — as we know them today — didn’t exist until the creation of the North American Numbering Plan. AT&T, the company Bell founded, formally introduced the plan in 1947, fully implementing it in 1951. The idea was to “simplify and facilitate” direct dialing of long-distance calls, according to the organization.
Prior to this, it was fairly common to see phone numbers listed like “8-3162” or “2-2639” in Utah. This system mostly relied on human operators to complete calls up until this point, and there weren’t enough people to transfer the growing demand for calls, as noted by the Atlantic. The new system allowed people to dial numbers to get exactly who they looking to call.
To make this work, the company introduced “numbering plan areas,” more commonly known as area codes, so each region had a distinct number to represent it.
AT&T had promoted this idea prior to the North American Numbering Plan, as evidenced by an ad it placed in a 1946 edition of the Mt. Pleasant Pyramid, so it’s not like Utahns were caught off-guard. They called it a “far cry from the day 70 years ago when Alexander Graham Bell first talked over a wire.”
Utah’s codes
LincMad Telephone Area Codes explains that there was an entire process behind the original area codes. For example, all area codes assigned to an entire state had “0” in the middle. Utah was one of those states at the time, while states with multiple codes received a “1” in the middle.
The rotary dial also factored in the numbers, LincMad added. The most populated areas generally ended up with lower numbers because it was easier to dial — hence why Washington, New York and Los Angeles all have area codes beginning with “2.”
While Utah was growing, its population only reached about 690,000 at the start of 1950, meaning New York City’s population was 11 times larger than all of Utah at the time, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. This is likely why Utah ended up with a higher starting number.
Atlas Obscura, also writing about this topic, pointed out that there “wasn’t really a specific order to how the area codes have been doled out” beyond those two factors. However, since it only used “0” and “1” in the middle, the outlet wrote that the system “was built with a degree of future-proofing,” in that it opened up the possibility of many new area codes should states grow.
That proved to be the case in Utah many years later.
In 1996, Utah had grown large enough that it was determined that it needed a new area code. This time U.S. West, a regional phone provider created after the breakup of AT&T, devised a plan that would keep Davis, Salt Lake, Utah and Weber counties on the original 801 area code, while everyone else would have a new area code, Deseret News reported at the time.
Nearly a year later, the North American Numbering Plan approved a final plan that allowed Morgan County to keep 801 too, while every other part of the state moved to the newly created 435 area code. The newspaper reported there was a small grace period, but all numbers in the new zone had to switch over to a 435 number by March 1998.
While U.S. West dissolved in 2000, it had correctly estimated in 1996 that the Wasatch Front would need another area code within about a decade because of how many people were moving into the region. The slow switch to cellphones also put a run on the 801 area code.
“We’re still, now, running out of numbers,” a spokeswoman for the Utah Public Service Commission told KSL in 2008.
This time, the 385 area code was created to give new residents moving into the Wasatch Front. This system remained after a failed legislative proposal calling for Salt Lake County to keep 801 while the rest of the region switched to 385.
Given the state’s growth, it’s likely the state will end up with more area codes in the future, too.
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