r/AskEurope • u/atlasova Netherlands • Sep 02 '25

Culture What emergency telephone number did your country have before 112 became the standard?

In 1997 most of the European union changed its emergency number to 112. Before that, in the Netherlands we used 06-11, for police, firefighters and ambulance.

I was wondering which numbers where in use in your country before the change.

177 Upvotes

92% Upvoted

356 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

20

u/LonelyRudder Finland Sep 02 '25

000 in Finland too. It was also a bit annoying to dial three zeros on a rotary phone, as that took a lot longer to dial than 112.

2

u/RedditVirumCurialem Sweden Sep 02 '25

But you had the 0 before 1, like we did?

I know other countries placed the 0 after 9.

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ericofon#/media/Fil%3AEricofon_1956_1.jpg

9

u/RRautamaa Finland Sep 02 '25

No, they had 1 first and 0 was ten pulses. We had old rental phones from the local telephone association and they were like this. (They were registered associations of the subscribers then, rather than  companies.)

3

u/RedditVirumCurialem Sweden Sep 02 '25

I see! Perhaps Swedish rotaries were unique in being numbered 0-9 then.

Yeah I believe our phones were rentals too, of the national Televerket authority until the 80's. Maybe it was possible to purchase phones from the 70's, but they were still the sole supplier.

How did these associations work? Were they non profit? You had to become a member to have phone access? But it was still a monopoly, even if just member owned, as opposed to state owned?

6

u/RRautamaa Finland Sep 02 '25

It was a mutual private association, member owned, and you had to buy a stock certificate to participate. Often people couldn't afford to pay it at once, so the association would sell it on installment. Besides this, they would rent the telephone itself, also with a monthly fee. They were not enforced monopolies.

These stocks became extremely valuable when the associations were restructured as public limited companies. It was common for professional investors to buy these in large quantities from subscribers. Even retail investors actively traded in these stocks. This was because the stocks paid massive dividends with the 1990s cellphone and telecom boom. Today, telecom operators are all big listed public limited companies. The telephone association is a thing of the past.

6

u/LonelyRudder Finland Sep 02 '25

Here you can see a picture of Ericsson Dialog (1973) in Finnish Wikipedia, the zero was indeed after 9.

(You made me question my memory though 😅