@Ajarylee in Argentina we used to have plugs similar to the European ones (they were like two/three sticks) and they changed it to the one Australia also has. The change happened years ago, im not even sure i was alive at the moment, but nowadays you can see how in older buildings there are the old plugs and it’s also quite common to see wall plugs with a dual system, it’s like the Australian plug but in the tip of the longer lines there are two dots, so both types of plugs work. The thing is that people need adapters all the time not because of the wall plugs, but our devices (specially phones and computers) have different kids of plugs and they won’t always work lol that’s what you get when your government puts shitty regulations in place and people have to buy their devices when they travel abroad.
@@YujiUedaFan Type G being the best one is just a meme. It's not reversible. We didn't go from USB type A to type C for nothing. So lets instead go to Type E. It has such a secure child safe system that it's even adult safe, it is reversible, isn't going to land with the prongs up on the floor, and other benefits.
The mess with country codes in eastern Europe is mainly caused by the collapse of the USSR (all of the USSR had +7), the reunification of West Germany (+49) and East Germany (was +37, now +49), and the break-up of Yugoslavia (+38). Several new countries wanted international dialing codes, and +37 and +38 could be reused as 3 digit dialing codes, so there were 20 new numbers available (+370 - +379 and +380 - +389).
Was about to comment this the second he questioned +380 for Ukraine. Like, yeah it's a big country NOW - but when the system was invented it was part of the USSR and had just +7.
The Idaho/Oregon one is the time zone boundary. Area codes dont cross state boundaries in the U.S. Different in Canada. 208 is for all of Idaho. I dunno why my mind stores all this useless information lol.
As to why lots of eastern European countries use 3 digit area codes is they were more recently added and previously internationally would have used +7 as part of the soviet phone system, Kazakhstan was the last country to leave the Soviet Union, still part of the EAU and still very integrated with Russia and so never felt like it had to leave. All guesswork, but that is my '2 cents' on it.
@@t111ran3 I think, technically, the second 7 (And maybe sometimes 6 or 2) is the domestic area code used for Kazakhstan within the former soviet telephone system(+7).
10:05 The Swiss Type plug and europeean types actually are compatible, if you only need the two power-phases. Only the arangement of the earth-phase is different, where the swiss design is smaller. But the C-Type is, if I‘m not mistaken a design introduced specificly to fit in both (for devices, that do not need a earth-conection)
@@mistermartin82 I wasn’t sure how the names in english are, but yes, most devices have phase and neutral, but some devices have phase, neutral and earth in the plug. There are also plugs with 3 phases, neutral and earth, but these are rather rare here
@@mistermartin82 Norway is a bit special, they mostly use two opposite 115 V phases and ground, no neutral. Usually doesn't matter because pretty much all 230 V equipment won't care. I think Albania also uses the same system. Tesla's portable charger is one of the rare exceptions, you need a special version for Norway because the standard European one gets confused.
@@enemixius sounds similar to the US system. I'd guess that it's perhaps not 2 phases but a single phase transformer with the centre tap being tied to earth. You have no neutral as you don't use 115v appliances, but you could by using that centre tap. In the UK and I assume other places neutral and earth are connected together
@@mistermartin82 The Norwegian system doesn't have a neutral, ground is connected to local ground, so using it as neutral would be a bit unpredictable. Yes, other systems in Europe have ground connected to neutral, but with its own separate wires to the box. Most new and upgraded installations have GFP breakers to detect if any current leaves the circuit.
Actually, you can't tell where someone in the US lives any more by their area code. For years now, you can take your full phone number with you when you move. So you can live in California and have a NYC area code, and visa versa (I don't know if that's true in any other country, though). And since "long distance" charges are no longer a thing, it really doesn't even matter any more.
@@joaopedrocruz6432 It used to be that way here in the US, but in the 2000s, long distance and roaming fees gradually went away. In 2003 I think, the federal government required carriers start supporting 'local number portability' for cell phones so if someone switched carriers, they could keep their number. Two or three years later, they required it for landline phones as well.
2:20 Note that that map doesn't show second area codes for highly populated zones. For example Austin, TX has both 512 and 737 as area codes for the same zone.
"Texas is the weirdest one, it looks like a gerrymandered map" which is a fitting map to complement their congressional district map But the real message of this educational vid: Never sit on your toes, it will hurt
Back in the 70s, you could get more specific than the area code; you could also tell what part of town someone lived from their phone number. The first three digits of the seven-digit number were the “exchange,” a concept which dated back to the era when operators had to connect calls manually. Those old switching stations became exchanges with their own three digit codes.
That still existed in the early 2010s in the town i grew up in, with the 3 digits after the area code indicating what town you were in & who your provider was 622 or 623 meant Bell and 626 meant Telus. You don’t see it too much anymore though since landlines are becoming much more uncommon
Meanwhile I just love how because of all the micro places in Europe, it makes the European part of the map look like Toycat is trying to send a secret message to us in Braille. Blink twice if you're being held hostage
2 года назад+21
I met a swiss friend in France, he asked me to plug his pc to charge it, I tried to plug it into my wall socket without looking, after 3-4 tries I quickly check his plug and I saw a stem on the center of the plug instead of a hole. My friend thought his plug was the european norm, I thought swizerland followed the standards so we where both confused.
When area codes needed expansion they initially split or rearranged the borders first, for example 417 used to be 314 . But since area codes started to grow, the decision was made to overlap area codes and in most places you dialed 10 digits to stop number waste
_> "in most places you dialed 10 digits to stop number waste"_ What does that even mean? I would assume you mean that if an area is using both 417 and 314, you could call a 7 digit number from either area code to the other, but that makes no sense at all, because then you don't have two area codes but just one, with an alias. You dial 10 digits to call a different area code, but only 7 within the same area code. You can always dial 10, which is easier, since you don't have to care what your area code is. But 417 and 314 (assuming they're used in the same region) will still have their own sets of 7 digit numbers
@@Liggliluff when a office code AKA central office is moved to another NPA number planning area AKA area code, it's customary to block that old CO code from reissue and put a recording on to tell traffic of the change of NPA and tell the caller to make note, hang up and redial with the new NPA
Even UK mobile numbers can’t be guaranteed which network it’s from, since you can move your number to a different network. I had a number that started on Orange with a Orange “area code” (remember when Orange was a thing), at some point I switched network and kept the same number.
West Germany had +49 and East Germany had +37. Today Germany has a uniform +49. The +37x has been given to the Baltic States and Belarus. In Europe there are +3x and +4x numbers. The whole of Europe should actually have a uniform area code, but the national states have rejected this.
@@sargis_02 Baltic states, Belarus AND Armenia AND AND Moldova (+373), Andorra (+376), Monaco (+377), San Marino (+378), Vatican (+379). Though Vatican hasn't officially begun using their allocated three digit code yet.
Area codes are quickly becoming irrelevant. Now that everyone has cell phones, we basically just have 10 digit numbers (yes you can get a little bit of Info about where the number was registered, but people often just keep their number no matter where the move. So you could have a Boston number and live it Texas or anything else weird.
Apparently when Greenland were getting codes there was no room in 3 4 or 5 so they were given 29 which I assume was turned into 299 when Faroe Islands was given 298. I'd assume at the time there was only 2 digit codes so there were only 10 in each region available.
as someone who lives in france near the swiss border, i can tell you how annoying it is to use european plugs in switzerland, the hexagon shape is what stops the plug from entering the socket, which makes some chargers fit in and some dont depending on the shape
I was paying $2.20 a gallon for premium in South West Florida before the pandemic. Currently paying $3.90 a gallon for regular (was $4.50 a gallon for regular a few weeks ago)
9:55 I understand your confusion. I'm from Switzerland. If you have a plug without the ground/earth-cable it works in Switzerland the same as the EU, but when you have a plug with the ground/earth-cable (e.g. for a hair dryer, some laptops, ...) you need an adapter. 😉
@@otrof6203 But you know what this middle one is for? It's to ground your device so you won't get a 230V shock if theres a broken part in the device or so.
@@photelegy yeah i know, my point being here in Bosnia if i dont have an adapter for it i just pull it out and use it and i still have devices working that way
Fun fact- all the original US area codes had a 1 or 0 as a middle digit. Important places had smaller numbers because they took less time to dial on a rotary phone. 212 = New York (5 pulses); 312 = Chicago (6 pulses); 507 = Southern Minnesota (22 pulses); 709 = Newfoundland, CA (26 pulses). Prefixes (the next three digits) had a middle digit of 2-9. All went redundant in the 90s when they allowed different middle digits. Prior to that, if you wanted to dial out of local area but in your actual area code, you only needed to dial 1. Then it changed to 1+area code regardless of where you dialed. It also used to be 1 line = 1 house. Now it’s 1 line = 1 mobile phone, some of which many people have more than one.
"Whatever's happening in the east over there" Canada on the old area code map is still one code per province, they're just small or cut off on the map so it needed lines.
Wow, Toycat, 43° is a really hot liquid water temperature! We have hot water where I live too! The liquid water temperature today where I’m at is only 41° which is an ambient air temperature of 105°. Happy July!
3:46 That's because they were all signatories of the North America Numbering Plan (which sets up all these numbers with a +1 xxx yyy-zzzz format. Furthermore, under the plan you will note (now no longer valid thanks to digital switching instead of mechanical) All area codes must have a 0 or 1 as the centre digit, which informs the switching office where in the country the call was to be routed.
We have the same type of thing in South Africa, but you can go even further, where you can, in big cities, even determine the suburb of the call, and in theory even the order in which those suburbs gained enough recognition and population to justify their own code. Of course, if you want to, you can still choose a custom available number, or set of sequential numbers, for your business if you want to pay the extra fee so it's not perfect. However, for most people, your neighbour's landline telephone number is unlikely to differ in more than 4 digits and big franchise businesses in the same mall usually occupy a range of sequential numbers if they opened at the same time as the mall itself.
In Australia, one company own the power infrastructure but others rent them. It's similar for landlines and mobile (cell) towers infrastructure, but multiple phone companies have infrastructure in the the same area.
When the 725 overlap area code was introduced in the Las Vegas valley about 8 years ago, people's heads almost exploded. The commonly used 1+area code+phone number format was generally used to contact someone in a different geographic area. Areas didn't have overlapping codes until a particular region began running out of numbers to issue. "Why do I have to dial a "1" first to contact someone in my household with a new mobile phone?" was not an uncommon point of confusion for some. I used to have to do some telephone work for one of the casinos that very recently was announced would be leveled in your area and some of my former co-workers thought I had magic powers when I could get a hold of people that they couldn't....simply by having a basic understanding of "how phones work", 😂.
But isn't it enough to dial area code and phone number? What does the 1 do? (Also worth noting that dialling 1-area code-phone number is _not_ using the international +1 code at the start, because that would be +1-area code-phone number, which in North America actually becomes 011-area code-phone number)
@@Liggliluff apparently I got a little mixed up in my explanation upon a re-read. The "1-area code-phone number" format was a standard for all "long distance calls" which did not apply to this. For "overlay" areas, or areas where 1 geographic area contains multiple area codes the "1" prior to the area code is unnecessary. As to what function it serves, I'm not entirely sure aside from indicating that a call is not "local".
@@FatShants Since under the NANP, no telephone numbers can begin with 0 or 1, it tells the switching office that the following numbers will be out of the callers zone, which in the old days only required dialling the 7 digit code for local calls. Nowadays, people are required to dial all ten digits even for local calls now (at least I do, maybe you can still call local with 7 digits only, but I haven't done so for 10 years.)
Before Covid when we were still in the office I noticed young people got confused trying to dial local numbers on our phone system. Most offices you had to dial 9 to get out and long distance in the US is 1+3 digit area code plus 7 digit number. So young people I think got the idea in their head you had to dial 91 to get out then the 10 digit number they were used to dialing on a cell phone. So when they tried to dial local it wouldn’t work and they’d get frustrated. To make things more confusing we have three area codes local 602, 480 & 623. So if they called one of those it was 9 only plus 10 digits. We were in 602 and I used to dial 9+7 for in area code all the time. They used to think I had magic phone powers too. I gave up on explaining 602 only needed 7 digits. They just didn’t understand and it will eventually change. The 480 area code now is 10 now for local inside it due to 988 being a 480 prefix. Phone system needs 480-988-xxxx format for the prefix now since just 988 would confuse it. That’s a new format for x11 type numbers like 911 you only need three digits (equivalent to 999 in UK or 112 in EU). With covid and work from home the dialer app we installed is just 10 digits period, no 9 and then 1+.
American numbers have a three digit area code, a three digit prefix, and a four digit... rest of the number. When I was a little kid in the 80s, I grew up in such a small town that we only had to dial the last four digits to call someone local because there was only one prefix for the town. Any calls made out of town, even just five miles down the road, were long distance and you had to dial 1 and the whole ten digit number. Then they came up with extended long distance where a few town were local and we started having to dial the prefix. Then the area code split into two overlapping area codes and we had to dial it too. Also, I grew up in one area code, it split in two and we got a new area code, then I moved to where the old area code is now located; but I only had a cell phone by this time and just kept my old number.
Swiss sockets are compatible with 2-pin, flat, unearthed Euro plugs, but not with the round, earthed plugs that you'd find on larger devices. And those round plugs actually fit into two different kinds of earthed Euro outlets - there's the German-style "Schuko" socket with symmetrical earth pins at the top and bottom, and the French-style socket with a center earth pin sticking out of the wall. Every plug made in at least the last 30 years fits both, but you'll see only one or the other in any given country.
13:04 You can still charge a Tesla with the normal power outlet at any house. It just takes very long. But if you go to a hotel you can charge it on any outlet over night to drive the other day 😉
Further in NA, the first 3 digits of a 7-digit phone number was generally used by the same town or municipality. Of course larger cities had multiple 3-digits. This still occurs with mobile numbers where depending on the person's address, the default is to assign a number with a 3-digit number used for landlines in a certain town.
People in the US who keep the same number even when they move across the country was a result of the “Number Portability” legislation in the late 90s. Prior to that, mobile numbers were tied to individual mobile carriers. That was considered a barrier to competition because consumers couldn’t switch from Verizon to AT&T without getting a new number. Getting a new number is a hassle and can be disruptive to people who rely on their phone for business, so congress passed number portability, which allows you to keep the same number with any carrier and regardless of where in the US you move to.
Fun fact about the 3-digit area codes: When they were introduced, they were limited to codes as: first and third digits= 2-9 second digit = 0 or 1 at time, telephones had a rotary (so 1 was the shorter digit to compose, 9 the longest, followed by zero. Therefore 212 was the shortest code to signal and 909 the longest to signal. They were assigned by population: 212: NYC 213: LA 312: Chicago 214: Dallas 313: Détroit 412: Pittsburgh …. 808: Hawaii 809: Caribbeans 907: Alaska
Some area codes are set from the letter codes on the keypad. for instance Knoxville TN, area code 865 was created inside the original 423 area code as the city grew. 865 also spells VOL, short for the State University of Tennessee mascot, VOLunteers, also located there.
It's not a toycat geography video until he asks the viewers to leave a 6 paragraph response that is loosely or not at all related to the original topic of the video
That map says it’s from the 90’s lol But it’s wrong/incomplete for 1997. By then, only part of Chicago had the 312 area code (mostly downtown), the rest, including me, had 773.
Interesting fact. Depending upon your cell phone carrier in the states, you can request any area code. I used to work for a phone company of a small town. We would give out area codes for anywhere from Miami to Alaska. The area code is assigned based on the zip code.
Maps of national gasoline prices usually don't include the state and local taxes, which is a huge amount. So, reporters will give the non-taxed price while standing in front of the big sign of prices which include the taxes. But truth in journalism is long gone...
Someone below already explained the breakup of the Soviet Union. Another post cold war effect is that East Germany's area code +37 got recycled into several 3-digit ones for the new countries Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
PS: Another cold war artefact was that East Germany's domestic area codes got rearranged. West Germany had left the entire 03x group unused (except for West Berlin 030) in order to be able to assign East Germany there. And that is how it was eventually done. Also, some Individual number groups inside Berlin had to be reassigned in order to incorporate them all into one single code.
Hyder, Alaska uses British Columbia area codes (236/750/778 which overlap in Northern BC), sharing the their three local exchange prefixes (one for each area code) with nearby Stewart BC.
When I was in Cuba, they had both Type A and C plugs. Maybe hotels have both and locals only use Type A, but they do say to bring an adapter just in case in the travel advisory I got.
18:02 - did you pay attention to the units? The UK prices are in pence, not pounds, while your Nevada prices are in Dollars. So it's not quite as bad (~ 0.27 £ compared to 0.10 $ - just a factor of 3, not a difference of 25 £).
We still-ish use area codes in Norway for landlines.. but they've stopped it in 2020, and they're going extict next year. Not really a lof of landlines left, so it doesn't really matter anymore.
Australia has 5 "area codes". 4 for (geographic) landlines - 02 for most of New South Wales all of Australian Capital Territory and Jervis Bay Territory; 03 for most of Victoria and all of Tasmania; 07 for most of Queensland; 08 for the country. The 5th "area code" - 04 for mobile (cell) phones.
You can do a long road trip in Nevada, I think I've seen, you would just have to charge off 120v plugs for RVs etc. Also, I think there might be a few slightly faster stations using standard(non-tesla) chargers I've heard of peaple using.
13:40 [Nevada is huge] - also, the land area of Nevada is larger than the area of the United Kingdom. (I used to similarly compare Texas with Germany.)
Being Portuguese I have no clue why I am +351 and Gibraltar is +350, Luxembourg is +352, Ireland is +353, Iceland is +354, +355 is Albania, +356 is Malta, +357 is Cyprus, +358 is Finland and +359 is Bulgaria. If you're wondering, +35 is not allocated. I don't get why Portugal, for example, isn't +35 (It's the most populous out of all of these countries, so why not?)
If Portugal was +35 you wouldn't be able to have a +350 range, because as soon as you dial +35, it starts being a Portuguese number. That's why there's a +1 but not a +10 or +100.
@@epender The numbers were allocated long ago according to expected number of users in the area. The larger and/or more industrialized countries got a 2-digit code, the smaller or more rural ones got a 3-digit code. You are right in that a 3-digit code means the xx0 - xx9 codes are allocated to 10 different countries and that means the xx code cannot be given to someone else.
2:54. You are entirely wrong. 208 does in fact cover the entire state of Idaho. That other yellow line going through Idaho separates Pacific time from Mountain Time. Northern Idaho (the panhandle) is Pacific Time, the rest of Idaho is Mountain Time. Also, this map is slightly inaccurate/incomplete. Idaho also has a second area code, 986, which was created in 2017 as an overlay of 208.
You need an adapter in Switzerland if you want to plug in something that needs a ground connector. This one is different between sourrounding countries where they use the "Schutzkontakt" with the round plug instead of the hexagonal. Your phone charger is most likely insulated by means of non conducting casing and protected against surges from the network, then it needs no ground and has only two pins and will fit. That's a Europlug. Well if you're from the UK you always need an adpater. There are also limits on how much load can be put on, there are plugs that are too thick and need adapters as well.
Here's my attempt at rationalizing the +4x area codes: +40 is clearly an inferior area code (because of the 0), so it wasn't initially assigned. So once several +7 countries started switching to +3x and +4x numbers, it was the last one available for a late joiner like Romania. Switzerland and Austria were like +4 is for central Europe, and we're the most central countries so we get the first actual codes. They started at 1 going left to right. - and I guess left +42 for Germany (+41 and +43)? West Germany was like: If +40 is the worst +4x code, then +49 is clearly the best. (Or they knew that the high codes were going to be less popular and wanted to leave +48 for a possible East German use, but East Germany stabbed their back by choosing +37.) UK was like: We need something easy to remember because there's so many English speaking countries where people might call us from, give us that sweet +44. (And no, we are not just taking a central European code because France snagged the other easy +33 code.) Denmark+Sweden+Norway wanted a consecutive trio of numbers with maybe some expansion room for Finland to take the 4th (+45 +46 +47, and obviously they assigned them going from Germany to the UK, because the opposite would have actually made sense.) So once Czechoslovakia and Poland got +4 numbers, +42 and +48 were available; +42 being geographically closer to Switzerland and Austria, and +48 being close to where +48 was supposed to go. And since Czechoslovakia split up into the Czech republic and Slovakia, the +42 code got split up into +420 and +421. Bonus fun fact: The European plugs are all kinda incompatible and yet all compatible because of 2 developments. When plugs were first introduced, the ground pin was not common, so the same design spread between everyone (except for the UK) with 2 round pins for the live and neutral pins at (roughly?) the same distance; (in fact, most plugs were initially circular) but once ground pins were introduced for safety, every country kludged together their own solution. But luckily that then meant that once appliances transitioned from being predominantly high-powered devices to being predominantly plastic-cased and using transformed down voltages, it was easy to (re-)introduce a common 2-pin plug. They just had to combine the most restrictive recessed socket shapes (the tips of the Swiss J plug with the width of the Italian L plug).
Technically the area code map you showed at the beginning covers not just the US but Canada and a number of Caribbean countries which share the same country code as the US (1). Also the 2022 North American area code map has some errors For instance in Southwestern Ontario there are actually three area codes in use: 226, 519 and 548. What I do find surprising is how a population of close to half a billion people can all be housed within one country code and many many three digit area codes.
Been to mainland China before & saw that they use Types A,F & I instead while its only HK (& Macau?) that use Type G. Singapore uses Type G wall sockets mostly except those for washing machines which occasionally are type C/D/M instead (but with the earth pin further away from the live & neutral ones, more like the pin placement in Type G) if they're rated for 15 instead of 13A, while many appliances sold here use Type F plugs instead & thus you need a basic power socket adaptor (Type F pins are smaller than Type G ones & thus could physically fit inside our Type G power socket's pins' holes, but 1st the adaptor is needed to push a flap (inside the power socket) that would've been done by the earth pin of a Type G plug (that Type F plugs lack), otherwise the flap would block you from plugging your device in (intended as a safety function, that you shouldn't be able to power up your device if the earth pin & wire aren't already inserted in place properly)
Apparently, when a state needs a new area code and they decide to split an area code, the largest city its surrounding areas keep the original code. In Tennessee, this means that 901 (1947) was Tennessee’s original area code until the areas East of the Tennessee River from Alabama to Kentucky became 615 in 1954. This worked until 1995 when the state split again into 3 codes ~ coextensive with the Grand Divisions by adding 423 in East Tennessee. . Here’s where the fun begins with breaking the conventional rules because of College Sports. I should mention that US area codes are generally contiguous. East Tennessee continued to grow and needed to split up again in 1999. Tennessee’s regulators got to looking at population centers and the map. Growth in Metropolitan Knoxville was driving the split. The area north of Knoxville was too big to be with Knoxville and too small for its own area code. Meanwhile, someone else (I’m sure) looked at available area codes and realized that VOL (865) was available. In this split, they first broke convention by deciding that the largest population center (Knoxville, home of the University of Tennessee Volunteers) would change area codes (to 865) and again by splitting 423 into two non-contiguous pieces in northeast Tennessee and southeast Tennessee.
I've had a Phoenix area code for years now, even after leaving Phoenix to return to the east coast. I actually had that area code before moving to Phoenix lol
Area codes actually never cross state lines. The boundaries in Idaho that you think are showing the WA area code are actually time zone lines.
cool fact
Yeah, the northern panhandle of Idaho is on Pacific time and a small rectangle of eastern Oregon is on Mountain time, creating that yellow line.
Theres one town in Maine that uses the Quebec area code
Ok bro
Yuuuuuuup
Greenland clearly saw that exact map where green was used to denote +2 and went "well, guess we've got to be green"
Before the telephone was invented, Greenland was just called Land
It’s kinda crazy how many different types of wall plugs there are. You’d think by this point in time that would be something universal
Type G is the best one. I hate the stupid flimsy US ones because they always fall out of walls with the converter attatched.
@Ajarylee in Argentina we used to have plugs similar to the European ones (they were like two/three sticks) and they changed it to the one Australia also has. The change happened years ago, im not even sure i was alive at the moment, but nowadays you can see how in older buildings there are the old plugs and it’s also quite common to see wall plugs with a dual system, it’s like the Australian plug but in the tip of the longer lines there are two dots, so both types of plugs work. The thing is that people need adapters all the time not because of the wall plugs, but our devices (specially phones and computers) have different kids of plugs and they won’t always work lol that’s what you get when your government puts shitty regulations in place and people have to buy their devices when they travel abroad.
@@YujiUedaFan no it's type N
@@YujiUedaFan my feet disagree.
@@YujiUedaFan Type G being the best one is just a meme. It's not reversible. We didn't go from USB type A to type C for nothing. So lets instead go to Type E. It has such a secure child safe system that it's even adult safe, it is reversible, isn't going to land with the prongs up on the floor, and other benefits.
The mess with country codes in eastern Europe is mainly caused by the collapse of the USSR (all of the USSR had +7), the reunification of West Germany (+49) and East Germany (was +37, now +49), and the break-up of Yugoslavia (+38). Several new countries wanted international dialing codes, and +37 and +38 could be reused as 3 digit dialing codes, so there were 20 new numbers available (+370 - +379 and +380 - +389).
Similar for Czechoslovakia +42 and after the split it is +420 for Czechia and +421 for Slovakia.
@@Ajgormy Although Liechtenstein was moved out of Switzerland's number space (where it had been +41 75) and was given +423.
Was about to comment this the second he questioned +380 for Ukraine. Like, yeah it's a big country NOW - but when the system was invented it was part of the USSR and had just +7.
@@Ajgormy Czechia is so lucky with their area code...
@@QemeH Be aware that the Sovjet Union had area-codes of up to 7 digits.
The Idaho/Oregon one is the time zone boundary. Area codes dont cross state boundaries in the U.S. Different in Canada. 208 is for all of Idaho. I dunno why my mind stores all this useless information lol.
As to why lots of eastern European countries use 3 digit area codes is they were more recently added and previously internationally would have used +7 as part of the soviet phone system, Kazakhstan was the last country to leave the Soviet Union, still part of the EAU and still very integrated with Russia and so never felt like it had to leave. All guesswork, but that is my '2 cents' on it.
Kazakhstan is actually getting its own code in 2023, it's 997
Ok
If I remember correctly, Ukraine had +8 as its' soviet phone code. May have to look it up rn
Edit: nope I'm wrong, it had +7. ignore me
I always thought our area code was +77 not +7, and I live here. Idk what's happening
@@t111ran3 I think, technically, the second 7 (And maybe sometimes 6 or 2) is the domestic area code used for Kazakhstan within the former soviet telephone system(+7).
That moment when you realize that this British guy probably knows more about the USA than the average American.
Doubt he doesn't even know basic facts about us.
@@poppy63765 cope
Toycat's thumbnail reaction faces are getting more expressive with each video
10:05 The Swiss Type plug and europeean types actually are compatible, if you only need the two power-phases. Only the arangement of the earth-phase is different, where the swiss design is smaller. But the C-Type is, if I‘m not mistaken a design introduced specificly to fit in both (for devices, that do not need a earth-conection)
probably phase and neutral, in the US you get 2 phases, in Europe it tends to be 1 phase plus neutral, or 3 phase plus neutral
@@mistermartin82 I wasn’t sure how the names in english are, but yes, most devices have phase and neutral, but some devices have phase, neutral and earth in the plug.
There are also plugs with 3 phases, neutral and earth, but these are rather rare here
@@mistermartin82 Norway is a bit special, they mostly use two opposite 115 V phases and ground, no neutral. Usually doesn't matter because pretty much all 230 V equipment won't care. I think Albania also uses the same system.
Tesla's portable charger is one of the rare exceptions, you need a special version for Norway because the standard European one gets confused.
@@enemixius sounds similar to the US system. I'd guess that it's perhaps not 2 phases but a single phase transformer with the centre tap being tied to earth. You have no neutral as you don't use 115v appliances, but you could by using that centre tap. In the UK and I assume other places neutral and earth are connected together
@@mistermartin82 The Norwegian system doesn't have a neutral, ground is connected to local ground, so using it as neutral would be a bit unpredictable.
Yes, other systems in Europe have ground connected to neutral, but with its own separate wires to the box. Most new and upgraded installations have GFP breakers to detect if any current leaves the circuit.
Actually, you can't tell where someone in the US lives any more by their area code.
For years now, you can take your full phone number with you when you move.
So you can live in California and have a NYC area code, and visa versa (I don't know if that's true in any other country, though).
And since "long distance" charges are no longer a thing, it really doesn't even matter any more.
At least in Brazil you need to change your location number when you move to other region (specially in other state) else you will pay roaming fees.
it's a great way to detect spam calls as well. all the spam calls I get is from where I got the number from and not where I live.
@@Lord_Zed I know! That's what I do, too!
@@joaopedrocruz6432 It used to be that way here in the US, but in the 2000s, long distance and roaming fees gradually went away. In 2003 I think, the federal government required carriers start supporting 'local number portability' for cell phones so if someone switched carriers, they could keep their number. Two or three years later, they required it for landline phones as well.
To be more accurate, you can get an idea of where they COME FROM
2:20 Note that that map doesn't show second area codes for highly populated zones. For example Austin, TX has both 512 and 737 as area codes for the same zone.
There are three area codes in the area I live in, in central Ontario (Canada). South of me, the area surrounding (but not including) Toronto has 4.
6:48 the weirdest one to me is Montenegro and Kosovo, which, according to the map, share dialing code +∞
British people trying an American accent will never not sound funny to me
Toycat basically speaks American in an English accent. So much of his vocabulary is American, it's really jarring to listen to as a Brit.
americans trying to speak british is even funnier
A lot of English people are really good at the American accent. The ones that are really bad, those are the ones that are fun to hear.
"Texas is the weirdest one, it looks like a gerrymandered map" which is a fitting map to complement their congressional district map
But the real message of this educational vid: Never sit on your toes, it will hurt
Back in the 70s, you could get more specific than the area code;
you could also tell what part of town someone lived from their phone number. The first three digits of the seven-digit number were the “exchange,” a concept which dated back to the era when operators had to connect calls manually. Those old switching stations became exchanges with their own three digit codes.
That still existed in the early 2010s in the town i grew up in, with the 3 digits after the area code indicating what town you were in & who your provider was 622 or 623 meant Bell and 626 meant Telus. You don’t see it too much anymore though since landlines are becoming much more uncommon
That’s so quaint lol
Meanwhile I just love how because of all the micro places in Europe, it makes the European part of the map look like Toycat is trying to send a secret message to us in Braille. Blink twice if you're being held hostage
I met a swiss friend in France, he asked me to plug his pc to charge it, I tried to plug it into my wall socket without looking, after 3-4 tries I quickly check his plug and I saw a stem on the center of the plug instead of a hole. My friend thought his plug was the european norm, I thought swizerland followed the standards so we where both confused.
When area codes needed expansion they initially split or rearranged the borders first, for example 417 used to be 314 . But since area codes started to grow, the decision was made to overlap area codes and in most places you dialed 10 digits to stop number waste
_> "in most places you dialed 10 digits to stop number waste"_
What does that even mean? I would assume you mean that if an area is using both 417 and 314, you could call a 7 digit number from either area code to the other, but that makes no sense at all, because then you don't have two area codes but just one, with an alias. You dial 10 digits to call a different area code, but only 7 within the same area code. You can always dial 10, which is easier, since you don't have to care what your area code is. But 417 and 314 (assuming they're used in the same region) will still have their own sets of 7 digit numbers
@@Liggliluff when a office code AKA central office is moved to another NPA number planning area AKA area code, it's customary to block that old CO code from reissue and put a recording on to tell traffic of the change of NPA and tell the caller to make note, hang up and redial with the new NPA
Even UK mobile numbers can’t be guaranteed which network it’s from, since you can move your number to a different network. I had a number that started on Orange with a Orange “area code” (remember when Orange was a thing), at some point I switched network and kept the same number.
Haha, good point. They tell you what mobile network someone was on when they registered their number.
West Germany had +49 and East Germany had +37. Today Germany has a uniform +49.
The +37x has been given to the Baltic States and Belarus.
In Europe there are +3x and +4x numbers. The whole of Europe should actually have a uniform area code, but the national states have rejected this.
…Batic States, Belarus AND Armenia (+374)
@@sargis_02 Baltic states, Belarus AND Armenia AND AND Moldova (+373), Andorra (+376), Monaco (+377), San Marino (+378), Vatican (+379). Though Vatican hasn't officially begun using their allocated three digit code yet.
Area codes are quickly becoming irrelevant. Now that everyone has cell phones, we basically just have 10 digit numbers (yes you can get a little bit of Info about where the number was registered, but people often just keep their number no matter where the move. So you could have a Boston number and live it Texas or anything else weird.
yup, I've had the same phone number over multiple phones in 3 different states lol. My landline is onbviously state bound though.
Apparently when Greenland were getting codes there was no room in 3 4 or 5 so they were given 29 which I assume was turned into 299 when Faroe Islands was given 298. I'd assume at the time there was only 2 digit codes so there were only 10 in each region available.
Why would they not just use the Denmark code tho?
@@fried___3217 They did before. With local indipendance they wanted their own country-code.
as someone who lives in france near the swiss border, i can tell you how annoying it is to use european plugs in switzerland, the hexagon shape is what stops the plug from entering the socket, which makes some chargers fit in and some dont depending on the shape
Old swiss sockets are not recessed but they're unsafe these days because someone could potentially plug it in wrongly and kill themselves.
Yeah, *the state of Nevada alone is larger than the UK.* In fact, there are 11 individual US states that are in fact larger than the UK. 🙂
You know what confuses me?
You bought a picture of a tree instead of a big salmon.
I was paying $2.20 a gallon for premium in South West Florida before the pandemic. Currently paying $3.90 a gallon for regular (was $4.50 a gallon for regular a few weeks ago)
6 to 7 dollars in California now 😭
lol I love how he never explained how the codes are assigned haha. Made me look it up
9:55
I understand your confusion. I'm from Switzerland.
If you have a plug without the ground/earth-cable it works in Switzerland the same as the EU, but when you have a plug with the ground/earth-cable (e.g. for a hair dryer, some laptops, ...) you need an adapter. 😉
i had a lot of hardware from switzerland, i just pulled the third thing out with pliers or something
@@otrof6203 But you know what this middle one is for?
It's to ground your device so you won't get a 230V shock if theres a broken part in the device or so.
@@photelegy yeah i know, my point being here in Bosnia if i dont have an adapter for it i just pull it out and use it and i still have devices working that way
@@otrof6203 Yes, that's right. It does work.
The whole mercator projection where Africa and Greenland are similar sizes makes sense suddenly 🤣
Fun fact- all the original US area codes had a 1 or 0 as a middle digit. Important places had smaller numbers because they took less time to dial on a rotary phone. 212 = New York (5 pulses); 312 = Chicago (6 pulses); 507 = Southern Minnesota (22 pulses); 709 = Newfoundland, CA (26 pulses). Prefixes (the next three digits) had a middle digit of 2-9.
All went redundant in the 90s when they allowed different middle digits. Prior to that, if you wanted to dial out of local area but in your actual area code, you only needed to dial 1. Then it changed to 1+area code regardless of where you dialed.
It also used to be 1 line = 1 house. Now it’s 1 line = 1 mobile phone, some of which many people have more than one.
"Whatever's happening in the east over there" Canada on the old area code map is still one code per province, they're just small or cut off on the map so it needed lines.
Wow, Toycat, 43° is a really hot liquid water temperature! We have hot water where I live too! The liquid water temperature today where I’m at is only 41° which is an ambient air temperature of 105°. Happy July!
3:46 That's because they were all signatories of the North America Numbering Plan (which sets up all these numbers with a +1 xxx yyy-zzzz format. Furthermore, under the plan you will note (now no longer valid thanks to digital switching instead of mechanical) All area codes must have a 0 or 1 as the centre digit, which informs the switching office where in the country the call was to be routed.
We have the same type of thing in South Africa, but you can go even further, where you can, in big cities, even determine the suburb of the call, and in theory even the order in which those suburbs gained enough recognition and population to justify their own code. Of course, if you want to, you can still choose a custom available number, or set of sequential numbers, for your business if you want to pay the extra fee so it's not perfect. However, for most people, your neighbour's landline telephone number is unlikely to differ in more than 4 digits and big franchise businesses in the same mall usually occupy a range of sequential numbers if they opened at the same time as the mall itself.
9:35 actually, Brazil uses type J. I've never seen a type I in my whole life.
In Australia, one company own the power infrastructure but others rent them. It's similar for landlines and mobile (cell) towers infrastructure, but multiple phone companies have infrastructure in the the same area.
1:38 great editing skills, that tree painting fits right in, doesn't overlap anything important... 😏
01:34 « I do love living in Paradise. » Funny pun Toy Cat! Paradise, NV is a suburb city in the Las Vegas Area.
When the 725 overlap area code was introduced in the Las Vegas valley about 8 years ago, people's heads almost exploded. The commonly used 1+area code+phone number format was generally used to contact someone in a different geographic area. Areas didn't have overlapping codes until a particular region began running out of numbers to issue. "Why do I have to dial a "1" first to contact someone in my household with a new mobile phone?" was not an uncommon point of confusion for some. I used to have to do some telephone work for one of the casinos that very recently was announced would be leveled in your area and some of my former co-workers thought I had magic powers when I could get a hold of people that they couldn't....simply by having a basic understanding of "how phones work", 😂.
But isn't it enough to dial area code and phone number? What does the 1 do?
(Also worth noting that dialling 1-area code-phone number is _not_ using the international +1 code at the start, because that would be +1-area code-phone number, which in North America actually becomes 011-area code-phone number)
@@Liggliluff apparently I got a little mixed up in my explanation upon a re-read. The "1-area code-phone number" format was a standard for all "long distance calls" which did not apply to this. For "overlay" areas, or areas where 1 geographic area contains multiple area codes the "1" prior to the area code is unnecessary. As to what function it serves, I'm not entirely sure aside from indicating that a call is not "local".
@@FatShants Since under the NANP, no telephone numbers can begin with 0 or 1, it tells the switching office that the following numbers will be out of the callers zone, which in the old days only required dialling the 7 digit code for local calls. Nowadays, people are required to dial all ten digits even for local calls now (at least I do, maybe you can still call local with 7 digits only, but I haven't done so for 10 years.)
Before Covid when we were still in the office I noticed young people got confused trying to dial local numbers on our phone system. Most offices you had to dial 9 to get out and long distance in the US is 1+3 digit area code plus 7 digit number. So young people I think got the idea in their head you had to dial 91 to get out then the 10 digit number they were used to dialing on a cell phone. So when they tried to dial local it wouldn’t work and they’d get frustrated. To make things more confusing we have three area codes local 602, 480 & 623. So if they called one of those it was 9 only plus 10 digits. We were in 602 and I used to dial 9+7 for in area code all the time. They used to think I had magic phone powers too. I gave up on explaining 602 only needed 7 digits. They just didn’t understand and it will eventually change. The 480 area code now is 10 now for local inside it due to 988 being a 480 prefix. Phone system needs 480-988-xxxx format for the prefix now since just 988 would confuse it. That’s a new format for x11 type numbers like 911 you only need three digits (equivalent to 999 in UK or 112 in EU). With covid and work from home the dialer app we installed is just 10 digits period, no 9 and then 1+.
Woah, I just thought it was one area code every state
Bro, I'm from Las Vegas! Awesome that you're living in my hometown. I've watched your videos since forever.
American numbers have a three digit area code, a three digit prefix, and a four digit... rest of the number. When I was a little kid in the 80s, I grew up in such a small town that we only had to dial the last four digits to call someone local because there was only one prefix for the town. Any calls made out of town, even just five miles down the road, were long distance and you had to dial 1 and the whole ten digit number. Then they came up with extended long distance where a few town were local and we started having to dial the prefix. Then the area code split into two overlapping area codes and we had to dial it too.
Also, I grew up in one area code, it split in two and we got a new area code, then I moved to where the old area code is now located; but I only had a cell phone by this time and just kept my old number.
Swiss sockets are compatible with 2-pin, flat, unearthed Euro plugs, but not with the round, earthed plugs that you'd find on larger devices. And those round plugs actually fit into two different kinds of earthed Euro outlets - there's the German-style "Schuko" socket with symmetrical earth pins at the top and bottom, and the French-style socket with a center earth pin sticking out of the wall. Every plug made in at least the last 30 years fits both, but you'll see only one or the other in any given country.
2:44 The legislators realized they were making an area code map and not an election map after they were done with it
13:04
You can still charge a Tesla with the normal power outlet at any house. It just takes very long. But if you go to a hotel you can charge it on any outlet over night to drive the other day 😉
7:32
"Portugal can get 35"
That looks like 351 to me personally
Further in NA, the first 3 digits of a 7-digit phone number was generally used by the same town or municipality. Of course larger cities had multiple 3-digits. This still occurs with mobile numbers where depending on the person's address, the default is to assign a number with a 3-digit number used for landlines in a certain town.
People in the US who keep the same number even when they move across the country was a result of the “Number Portability” legislation in the late 90s. Prior to that, mobile numbers were tied to individual mobile carriers. That was considered a barrier to competition because consumers couldn’t switch from Verizon to AT&T without getting a new number. Getting a new number is a hassle and can be disruptive to people who rely on their phone for business, so congress passed number portability, which allows you to keep the same number with any carrier and regardless of where in the US you move to.
Fun fact about the 3-digit area codes: When they were introduced, they were limited to codes as:
first and third digits= 2-9
second digit = 0 or 1
at time, telephones had a rotary (so 1 was the shorter digit to compose, 9 the longest, followed by zero. Therefore 212 was the shortest code to signal and 909 the longest to signal. They were assigned by population:
212: NYC
213: LA
312: Chicago
214: Dallas
313: Détroit
412: Pittsburgh
….
808: Hawaii
809: Caribbeans
907: Alaska
Some area codes are set from the letter codes on the keypad. for instance Knoxville TN, area code 865 was created inside the original 423 area code as the city grew. 865 also spells VOL, short for the State University of Tennessee mascot, VOLunteers, also located there.
It's not a toycat geography video until he asks the viewers to leave a 6 paragraph response that is loosely or not at all related to the original topic of the video
That map says it’s from the 90’s lol
But it’s wrong/incomplete for 1997. By then, only part of Chicago had the 312 area code (mostly downtown), the rest, including me, had 773.
Interesting fact. Depending upon your cell phone carrier in the states, you can request any area code. I used to work for a phone company of a small town. We would give out area codes for anywhere from Miami to Alaska. The area code is assigned based on the zip code.
In Germany those codes are just for landlines but yes you can also tell where someone is from from these first few digits.
Give me mind craft con tent irl
Maps of national gasoline prices usually don't include the state and local taxes, which is a huge amount. So, reporters will give the non-taxed price while standing in front of the big sign of prices which include the taxes. But truth in journalism is long gone...
Nope. Greenland is not part of Africa. Africa is part of Greenland.
Greenlandic Empire
Someone below already explained the breakup of the Soviet Union. Another post cold war effect is that East Germany's area code +37 got recycled into several 3-digit ones for the new countries Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
PS: Another cold war artefact was that East Germany's domestic area codes got rearranged. West Germany had left the entire 03x group unused (except for West Berlin 030) in order to be able to assign East Germany there. And that is how it was eventually done.
Also, some Individual number groups inside Berlin had to be reassigned in order to incorporate them all into one single code.
Hyder, Alaska uses British Columbia area codes (236/750/778 which overlap in Northern BC), sharing the their three local exchange prefixes (one for each area code) with nearby Stewart BC.
This is why pipelines are efficient. We could just go full Nuclear though.
When I was in Cuba, they had both Type A and C plugs. Maybe hotels have both and locals only use Type A, but they do say to bring an adapter just in case in the travel advisory I got.
part of the reason exxon mobil doesn't cover vast parts of the us may still be that when standard oil spilt it was done so by region
Utah has 3 area codes, 801 was the first one they added in 1947, 385 was introduced in 2009, and 435 is used in St. George
when it's literally as hot in London as in Paradise, you know something's up.
kindof sus how Hell is colder than in Paradise
In Canada (At Least Ontario) +1 is also for long distances
My grandma lives 100kms from where I am, but I can’t call her house phone without adding +1
18:02 - did you pay attention to the units? The UK prices are in pence, not pounds, while your Nevada prices are in Dollars. So it's not quite as bad (~ 0.27 £ compared to 0.10 $ - just a factor of 3, not a difference of 25 £).
Someone needs to start a toycat buys cow painting fund right now. It must be done.
you have a talent where your hair is always looking greasy
i am gonna guess that +7 was USSR and everyone exiting it were like "YEAH FUCK USSR I DONT WANNA THE SAME PHONE CODE" so they just got leftover +3's
We still-ish use area codes in Norway for landlines.. but they've stopped it in 2020, and they're going extict next year. Not really a lof of landlines left, so it doesn't really matter anymore.
Tampa actually has 2 area codes 2:23 they just added another one this year
Australia has 5 "area codes". 4 for (geographic) landlines - 02 for most of New South Wales all of Australian Capital Territory and Jervis Bay Territory; 03 for most of Victoria and all of Tasmania; 07 for most of Queensland; 08 for the country. The 5th "area code" - 04 for mobile (cell) phones.
Interestingly that area code map is out of date. The 937 area code no longer includes Dayton, it now has its own.
You can do a long road trip in Nevada, I think I've seen, you would just have to charge off 120v plugs for RVs etc. Also, I think there might be a few slightly faster stations using standard(non-tesla) chargers I've heard of peaple using.
Yeah, I'm fairly sure CGP Grey did this trip a few years back?
@@CharlesGregory That's what I remember too.
You better take the cow painting back to the UK with you, I love it so much
13:40 [Nevada is huge] - also, the land area of Nevada is larger than the area of the United Kingdom. (I used to similarly compare Texas with Germany.)
Being Portuguese I have no clue why I am +351 and Gibraltar is +350, Luxembourg is +352, Ireland is +353, Iceland is +354, +355 is Albania, +356 is Malta, +357 is Cyprus, +358 is Finland and +359 is Bulgaria.
If you're wondering, +35 is not allocated.
I don't get why Portugal, for example, isn't +35 (It's the most populous out of all of these countries, so why not?)
If Portugal was +35 you wouldn't be able to have a +350 range, because as soon as you dial +35, it starts being a Portuguese number. That's why there's a +1 but not a +10 or +100.
As for why Portugal got a three digit number... nobody knows, at least I don't. It's a very messy system but hey, it works.
@@epender The numbers were allocated long ago according to expected number of users in the area. The larger and/or more industrialized countries got a 2-digit code, the smaller or more rural ones got a 3-digit code.
You are right in that a 3-digit code means the xx0 - xx9 codes are allocated to 10 different countries and that means the xx code cannot be given to someone else.
Toycat telling people to write essays in the comments will never get old.
I knew about toycat's minecraft channel but i didnt know he has another channel all about geography. Ngl i love it
2:54. You are entirely wrong. 208 does in fact cover the entire state of Idaho. That other yellow line going through Idaho separates Pacific time from Mountain Time. Northern Idaho (the panhandle) is Pacific Time, the rest of Idaho is Mountain Time. Also, this map is slightly inaccurate/incomplete. Idaho also has a second area code, 986, which was created in 2017 as an overlay of 208.
3:57 Belize, which isn't in Latin America and also doesn't have +1 phone numbers:
Other way round for Dominican Republic too lol
1:39 Paradise is actually the name of the central suburb of Las Vegas
You need an adapter in Switzerland if you want to plug in something that needs a ground connector. This one is different between sourrounding countries where they use the "Schutzkontakt" with the round plug instead of the hexagonal. Your phone charger is most likely insulated by means of non conducting casing and protected against surges from the network, then it needs no ground and has only two pins and will fit. That's a Europlug. Well if you're from the UK you always need an adpater. There are also limits on how much load can be put on, there are plugs that are too thick and need adapters as well.
damn that sounds confusing to an american... but mains electricity also scares the shit out of me so I kind of understand all the hubbub
Found it funny that this video was going really professionally then the sitting thing happened.
+1 (207)
Ironically enough we are getting a new one soon because we are out of 207 numbers
Here's my attempt at rationalizing the +4x area codes:
+40 is clearly an inferior area code (because of the 0), so it wasn't initially assigned. So once several +7 countries started switching to +3x and +4x numbers, it was the last one available for a late joiner like Romania.
Switzerland and Austria were like +4 is for central Europe, and we're the most central countries so we get the first actual codes. They started at 1 going left to right. - and I guess left +42 for Germany (+41 and +43)?
West Germany was like: If +40 is the worst +4x code, then +49 is clearly the best. (Or they knew that the high codes were going to be less popular and wanted to leave +48 for a possible East German use, but East Germany stabbed their back by choosing +37.)
UK was like: We need something easy to remember because there's so many English speaking countries where people might call us from, give us that sweet +44. (And no, we are not just taking a central European code because France snagged the other easy +33 code.)
Denmark+Sweden+Norway wanted a consecutive trio of numbers with maybe some expansion room for Finland to take the 4th (+45 +46 +47, and obviously they assigned them going from Germany to the UK, because the opposite would have actually made sense.)
So once Czechoslovakia and Poland got +4 numbers, +42 and +48 were available; +42 being geographically closer to Switzerland and Austria, and +48 being close to where +48 was supposed to go. And since Czechoslovakia split up into the Czech republic and Slovakia, the +42 code got split up into +420 and +421.
Bonus fun fact: The European plugs are all kinda incompatible and yet all compatible because of 2 developments. When plugs were first introduced, the ground pin was not common, so the same design spread between everyone (except for the UK) with 2 round pins for the live and neutral pins at (roughly?) the same distance; (in fact, most plugs were initially circular) but once ground pins were introduced for safety, every country kludged together their own solution.
But luckily that then meant that once appliances transitioned from being predominantly high-powered devices to being predominantly plastic-cased and using transformed down voltages, it was easy to (re-)introduce a common 2-pin plug. They just had to combine the most restrictive recessed socket shapes (the tips of the Swiss J plug with the width of the Italian L plug).
Weird that in Vegas the code is 702, I live in Northern Virginia and the code is 703
the line cutting Idaho in half is the time zone line, not an area code boundary
Technically the area code map you showed at the beginning covers not just the US but Canada and a number of Caribbean countries which share the same country code as the US (1). Also the 2022 North American area code map has some errors For instance in Southwestern Ontario there are actually three area codes in use: 226, 519 and 548. What I do find surprising is how a population of close to half a billion people can all be housed within one country code and many many three digit area codes.
14:31 probably in 2020, it was really cheap.
Also Costco has gas stations?
Loving all the content lately, you're feeding us.
Toycat keeps saying area codes have free digits. I don’t get it. Do they charge for digits in the UK? How strange!
Been to mainland China before & saw that they use Types A,F & I instead while its only HK (& Macau?) that use Type G. Singapore uses Type G wall sockets mostly except those for washing machines which occasionally are type C/D/M instead (but with the earth pin further away from the live & neutral ones, more like the pin placement in Type G) if they're rated for 15 instead of 13A, while many appliances sold here use Type F plugs instead & thus you need a basic power socket adaptor (Type F pins are smaller than Type G ones & thus could physically fit inside our Type G power socket's pins' holes, but 1st the adaptor is needed to push a flap (inside the power socket) that would've been done by the earth pin of a Type G plug (that Type F plugs lack), otherwise the flap would block you from plugging your device in (intended as a safety function, that you shouldn't be able to power up your device if the earth pin & wire aren't already inserted in place properly)
I'm very disappointed to see my subscription support going toward editing instead of toward lobster rolls.
I'm disappointed in myself too
Apparently, when a state needs a new area code and they decide to split an area code, the largest city its surrounding areas keep the original code. In Tennessee, this means that 901 (1947) was Tennessee’s original area code until the areas East of the Tennessee River from Alabama to Kentucky became 615 in 1954. This worked until 1995 when the state split again into 3 codes ~ coextensive with the Grand Divisions by adding 423 in East Tennessee.
.
Here’s where the fun begins with breaking the conventional rules because of College Sports. I should mention that US area codes are generally contiguous. East Tennessee continued to grow and needed to split up again in 1999. Tennessee’s regulators got to looking at population centers and the map. Growth in Metropolitan Knoxville was driving the split. The area north of Knoxville was too big to be with Knoxville and too small for its own area code. Meanwhile, someone else (I’m sure) looked at available area codes and realized that VOL (865) was available. In this split, they first broke convention by deciding that the largest population center (Knoxville, home of the University of Tennessee Volunteers) would change area codes (to 865) and again by splitting 423 into two non-contiguous pieces in northeast Tennessee and southeast Tennessee.
Maybe consider making a video on why your water tastes funny. Huge rabbithole with Lake Mead about to dry up and all atm.
fun fact, in china each province and city had their own code too, some of them are still usable
+27 here lol , I believe there are area codes here within South Africa, you can tell from where someone is calling here
I've had a Phoenix area code for years now, even after leaving Phoenix to return to the east coast. I actually had that area code before moving to Phoenix lol
2:30 this is actually a bit outdated, San Jose area also added 669 due to almost running out of 408 numbers.