Why was 911 invented as the number to dial for emergency in America?
459905
To memory  various emergency number is not easy for many people. So it is the good thing that there is one dial number.
439203
According to Republic Broadcasting Network radio, 911 was an inside government job to enable Bush to start his war on terror and take more of our freedom away.  It was another step towards a one world government.
562782
Because of 911, we need to protect ourselves.  You didn't specifiy which border, but I think all borders should be protected by troops. (...all 4)of border police.\nI like the idea someone had of helping our neighboring countries improve their livelihoods so people would prefer to  only visit us.
275851
he invented the telephone
1160888
The shortest quickest easiest answer to this question that fulfills all of the above conditions while introducing the least amount of explanation ( applying Ockhams razor) is that 911 WAS AN INSIDE JOB.  TruthSeeker you rock!!
547300
If we had had stricter polices regarding illegal and Legal aliens. 911 would have never happened. Long past due. Rights should be uniform for all illegals, whether they walk swim fly or drive to our Country. Try going to one of the other Countries and mass assemble in the streets demanding rights to a Country to which you are not a Citizen. How many of their Family members have perished to preserve our freedom or build this country?  You will find yourself put away in a cell, naked with about 50 others. \nAlso the boycott, was ridiculous! They were acting like terrorist! Demanding that we give them rights because, "they broke the Law". The world has gone insane!
1036124
yes it can, you can do that in the meantime, if you are alone and waiting for the paramedics.\n\nof course you still need to call 911
76100
911\nor scream Help and hopefully someone else will call if you can't\nR U OK? get out of your house or wherever u are right now first- make sure you are safe first!
53756
I strongly believe in our right to privacy. However they are not listening to my phone calls, and if it would save American lives then I would gladly let them listen. One previous answer quoted Ben Franklin. However Franklin lived in a much different time and couldn't even imagine the enemyies we are facing today. How would you feel if they could have avoided the 911 attack by listening to a phone call and didn't because they did not want to infringe on the civil liberties of a few wack jobs.
419855
Our little city here in Texas is has just issued a new rule, we need to have our street address in reflective letters and numbers across our front door, so if we call 911 ever they no where to find us, which is good but it makes our house look tacky having it across our front door...God bless
645150
None.\n\nDo a search on "911 Conspiracy" and you will get your answers.
21918
There is never a charge to call 911 from any phone.  You could however be fined if you abused the service for non-emergency situations.\n\nIf the person needs medical attention, the paramedics will give them immediate care and take the person to the hospital if necessary.\n\nAny charges for medical services will charged by the hospital and billed to the patient.  They may also charge for the ambulance ride in certain jurisdictions.
44886
Here is a transcript of a really interesting discussion about this from an NPR broadcast.  It seems that Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, wanted us to say "Ahoy".
453682
When your home phone is disconnected there is no service-period. There is no legislation that requires them to give you access to 911 services.
861697
Hi there:\n\nThe cell phone keyboard with the typical ABC\nis, as one answerer stated, a clone of the Alexander Graham Bell    configuration put out by Bell Laboratories, many years ago.\nAs someone stated, this crude way of using the numbers to\nget " words" was a memonic aid, so that "ASH 277" would be easier to remember, than all numbers. Since there were only a few phones, by grouping 3 or 4 numbers into a word, meant you only had to remember the last few digits, so " ROCK " would be the first area code for 999 phone numbers, and you just had to remember the last three digits.\n ( more Bell Labs trivia - did you know that the # sign is an octothorpe? This is out of a 1967 RED BOOK handbook for Bell Linemen... since then the name has been lost, and no one knows what it is called anymore, not even computer reference guides....   -- and, Alexander Bell wanted a word to sign in on a phone call CLEARLY, and searched around the world for a sound that was easy to recognize - the best he could find was the call for fishermen in foggy weather, who yelled AH - Looo, which reverberated like a fog horn and helped to prevent two sailing ships from hitting each other - He modified it a bit and invented the word " hello ", which never existed in the English language until he had all his operators use it... )\n  \n As for the QWERTY layout of the keyboard, here is a previous answer that I gave... your question is asked repeatedly on the ANSWER forum...\n\n__________________________________\n\nEarly typewriters were mechanically crude and the swing arms that\nhad the letters on the end moved 6 inches or more from a circle around\nthe center of the page. If two arms reached the same strike slot,\nthey jammed together, often bending the thin swing arms.\n\nA group of Engineers was given a typewriter by Remmington in New York, to design a jam- proof machine. Instead, the Engineers looked at a data base of the most used and least used\nletters of the English alphabet.\nThey put the most used letters on the LEFT hand, since most people are right  handed, and the most used letters on the weakest, least used fingers - note that  the letter "A" is on the baby finger on the left hand. The baby finger on the left hand was designated the weakest, most difficult to use finger, while the letter A is always abound across almost all amounts of actual typing.\nThe ploy worked, and typists who were using the common keyboard of the day, with all the letters in alphabetical order, slowed to an absoute crawl.\nRepairs of jammed keys stopped immediately.\nDVORAK was designed to improve typing, and " reportedly " quadruples the words per minute.\nRAND in England designed a keyboard with two bowls shaped to\nfit the human hand natural swing movements, so that the typist\ndoes not "reach" for top row keys and left and right keys, but\nmoves only the fingers, and unlike the old typewriters, which had\nkeys that would have to be pressed down against huge springs,\nabout one to two INCHES, the RAND keyboard had touch-screen like keys, that have no visible movement at all. The words per minute reach 2000, easily, by anyone with a bit of practice.\nToday, on a typical computer, programmers and general public are considered " good " if they can do 30 or 60 words per minute.\nSecretaries start at 120 words per minute.\nMost of the computer people I know still use two fingers, including\nsome of the fastest and best programmers, following the GIGO rule.\n(( Computers use a stack of memory, which programmers fill and recall with numbers, using either FIFO or FILO, First In, First OUT, or First in, Last Out. All early calculators like the HP65 I use, with RPN ( Reverse Polish Notiation) use FILO ). GIGO is a parody of this terminology, with Garbage In = Garbage Out. ie. Typing in huge amounts of poorly written and poorly tested program code, is not as fast as typing in well written, well tested
1105059
They do. It is 211, 911 is for emergencies only.
15335
The new emergency number had to be three numbers that were not in use in the United States or Canada as the first three numbers of any phone number or area code, and the numbers had to be easy to use. The Federal Trade Commission along with AT&T (which held a monopoly on phone services at that time) originally announced the plans to build the first 911 system in Huntington, Indiana. Bob Gallagher, President of the Alabama Telephone, was annoyed that the independent phone industry had not been consulted. Gallagher decided to beat AT&T to the punch line and have the first 911 emergency service built in Haleyville, Alabama.  \nI got that from: http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl911.htm\nHere is more information: http://www.911dispatch.com/911/history/\n\nAs for the similarties, we do not know for sure, but it may have been that Bin Laden was trying to make a symbolic gesture by using the date 9/11.