early 12c., one of the ecclesiastical princes who constitute the sacred college (short for cardinalis ecclesiae Romanae or episcopus cardinalis), from Latin cardinalis principal, chief, essential (see cardinal (adj.)). Ecclesiastical use began for the presbyters of the chief (cardinal) churches of Rome.
In 1889, the rotary telephone dial was invented by Almon B. Strowger , a Kansas City undertaker. The first dial exchange was installed at La Porte, Indiana, in 1892. In 1943, Philadelphia was the last major area to give up dual service.
From the 1960s onward, the rotary dial was gradually supplanted by dual-tone multi-frequency push-button dialing, first introduced to the public at the 1962 World's Fair under the trade name Touch-Tone.Touch-tone technology primarily used a keypad in form of a rectangular array of push-buttons for dialing.lder Australian rotary dial telephones also had letters, but the combinations were often printed in the center plate adjacent to the number. The Australian letter to number mapping was: A=1, B=2, F=3, J=4, L=5, M=6, U=7, W=8, X=9, Y=0, so the phone number BX 3701 was in fact 29 3701.