Anyone know by what year was it common for most U.S. homes to have phones?

[zonkers]

Its kind of a random question but where better to pose one. I would guess right after WWII but I could be wrong.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

1. Earlier than that, I think. Probably by the '30s except in some rural areas.

But there were party lines and sometimes you had to go through an operator. I remember the way my grandma's phone worked even in the '50s - it was on a party line. If the phone rang twice you picked it up because it was for that number. If it rang once it was for the other number on the same line.

[SCantiGOP]

2. at a small town I lived in years ago

I bought a phone book at an antique store from 1925. All of the numbers were 2 digits, and you placed the calls through an operator. Most of the listings were businesses. Town is now about 3,500, so it was probably smaller then.

[KamaAina]

6. Berryville, Ark. had five-digit numbers through the '70s

if you were calling from outside, you dialed the full [phone] (for example), but within Berryville, since there were only a couple of other exchanges in the local area, you just dialed 3-1000.

[zonkers]

3. So, even working class people in big cities probably all had phones after WWII.

Its amazing how fast technology advances.

[kick-ass-bob]

4. There were over 3M phones in 1904

http://www.corp.att.com/history/history1.html

which supposedly was about 8% of the total households
(unknown source):
http://www.davidstuff.com/general/1904.htm

[geardaddy]

5. My grandparents didn't have a phone until the 1970s

My mom would have to call the neighbors and they would walk the quarter mile to my grandparents house to tell them my mom was calling.

My grandpa was cheap.

[Chan790]

9. My grandparents were cheap too.

They had a party line until the 1980s because they refused to change the phone on the wall or allow the phone company to run the new wire needed to assign them their own number. (Apparently this kept the phone bill to something absurd even then like $0.65/mo.) Grandpa only relented when SNET started charging him a surcharge for forcing them to continue archaic technology just to service him.

[HopeHoops]

7. I remember seeing one in 1965 or so.

[RebelOne]

8. Well, I was born in 1939 and I remember

my parents always having a phone. Throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s and so on,I always had a phone. In fact, I cannot imagine anyone never having one.

[femmocrat]

10. We got a phone in the early 1950s.

My mother told us that in the neighborhood where she grew up (1930s and 40s), only one house had a phone. Everyone would go there to use it, and the owners actually charged them 5 cents!

We also had a party line through the 1960s. Those were terrible!

[applegrove]

11. I lived in a lady's house in 1984. She had an old phone from the 1920s still hooked

up to a telephone line. One of the ones where you hold an earpiece to your ear and talk into a large box on a wall. That was in a suburb near the downtown.