BY THE NUMBERS

By The Numbers, a look at what’s in the news . . . by the numbers. These are just numbers, not suggestions that they mean more or less than what they are. We do not suggest that one number is connected to another. These are simply facts with no extraneous details, bias or slanted reporting. To borrow (and perhaps mangle a bit) a quote from legendary fictional detective Joe Friday, it’s just the numbers, ma’am!

Telephones!

11-18-63

On this date 61 years ago, the first push-button telephone went into service. For a few in our reading audience, it represented a giant change. Our older readers remember growing up with crank telephones where you turned a crank on the phone to connect to an operator. Then rotary dial phones came along and calls could be made directly to a specific person or place without assistance. And in 1963, the push-button phone came along through the Bell telephone company (remember Bell?).

29%

In 2022, a survey from the Centers for Disease Control found that 29 percent of U.S. adults lived in a house with a landline phone.

90%

On the other hand, our friends at cnet report that 90 percent of U.S. adults lived in a house with a landline in 2004. Think about that for a second. That was only 20 years ago!

97%

According to the Pew Research Center, 97 percent of Americans own a cellular phone of some kind.

270

How many minutes a day on average Americans spend on their mobile phones.

144

That’s how many times a day we check our phones.

11.6

That’s how old most kids are when they get their first phone. By age 15, most American kids have one.

59%

That’s the percentage of the world’s Internet traffic that comes through phones.