Using A Telephone Number To Help Date Your Cutlery.

[New_Windsor_NY]

Here are two "charts" that I found that may assist you in determining what time period your knife is from. These "charts" will only help you if there is a telephone number associated with the knife in question. This is particularly true with advertising type cutlery and of course, these apply to the U.S.A. only. I DO NOT guarantee the accuracy of the posted material.
Caption(s), if any, are on the BOTTOM of the corresponding picture(s).
Click on a picture to ENLARGE.

[cudgee]

Thanks for posting Skip, very interesting.

[New_Windsor_NY]

Thanks.....

You're welcome and thank you.

[1967redrider]

Very interesting, Skip, I never even thought of that.

[New_Windsor_NY]

Very.....

Thank you John.

[zzyzzogeton]

In a similar manner, ZIP Codes and Zone Codes can be used in a general fashion. I've used mailing addresses in ads and catalogs to narrow dates down. As an example, if a paper product from Western has Longmont as the town, it is from 1978 to 1991.

5 digit zip codes came into use in 1963.

ZIP + 4 ZIP codes were first introduced in 1983.

The use of 3 digit Zone codes was proposed by a postal worker, Robert Moon, of Philadelphia, in response to a lack of postal carriers gone off to war and a backlog of mail to be sorted. The postal service chose to use two digit numbers, inserted between the city and state in an address. Introduced in 1943, these were called Postal Zones and was the precursor to ZIP codes.

In traditional America custom, the leading 0 was frequently dropped for districts 1 through 9. Chicago actually started using codes locally in the early 1920s and eventually had 48 districts. There were only 124 Postal Zones cities in 1943, essentially in the largest population centers of the time. Different websites list the max number as 136, 153 and 178, possibly refering to cities that grew large enough to warrant postal zones.

ZIP is the correct spelling as opposed to "zip" because ZIP is an acronym for "Zoning Improvement Plan".

[tongueriver]

All good info worth saving; thanx, folks. In my small town (2500?) in the 1950s and just into the 1960s barely, there were telephone numbers such as 24J. Our number was 609. That's it; no more, no less. But we were going through a "Number please!" real purty lady operator with an old oak and iron switchboard. Whatever happened to those millions of tons of black bakelite telephones?

[zzyzzogeton]

Landfills

[treefarmer]

I remember in the early 50's we had a 4 number telephone, 4819 outside of Orlando a few miles. It was a party line, each family had a special ring, 2 shorts, 2 longs, one short and a long, etc. All this happened just a couple of years after we got electricity. The phone number kept getting larger as the years progressed, it went from 4819 to 7-4819 and then to CRestwood 4819 and finally it was simply 277-4819. Then the area code became part of the number. Until a couple of months ago all our local calls were just the regular 7 digits but now we have to use the 850 area code to call a neighbor across the pasture. They have added another area code here in our county with less than 25,000 residents.
Treefarmer

[Mason]

Some good information Skip. As collectors, we weave every possible detail into cracking the mysteries of the past.

[cody6268]

Area codes are another thing. In my area through the early 1990s, it was 703; then 540; then in the early 2000s; they moved to 276, which is still being used. They say that won't run out for decades, but with all the telemarketers creating new numbers; we'll see about that. I've gotten more robocalls than there are residents in many of these tiny one-horse towns these calls claim to be from. In many cases, these towns are unincorporated communities of less than a couple hundred residents.

[New_Windsor_NY]

Some.....

Thank you Mason.