Friday / Weekend Open Line

In the early days of the telephone, knowing who had one and what the number was quickly became a problem. The first telephone directory in the U.S. was published on this date in 1878 in New Haven, Connecticut. It wasn’t a big list — there were only 50 subscribers. A little later, a directory also came out in San Francisco, with about 170 names. Now, there are over 22,000 retail establishments in the U.S. selling landline and cellular phones, with annual receipts from such sales at over $10 billion. Nearly 113 million — or over 97 percent — of occupied households in the U.S. have telephone service. You can find current data on the country’s economy by downloading the America’s Economy mobile app at www.census.gov/mobile