Origins
112 was first standardized by a decision of the EU Council in 1991 and subsequently reaffirmed in 2002 by article 26 of the Universal Service Directive and its subsequent amendments.
This choice of number has the following advantages:
- Using at least two different digits significantly reduces the risk of accidental calls from numeric keypads. Young children, vibrations, defective keys and collisions with other objects are much more likely to press the same key repeatedly rather than pressing a sequence of different keys. Accidental calls to emergency centres from mobile phones are a particular problem with same-digit numbers, such as the UK's 999.
- In the days of rotary dial telephones, using only those digits that require the least motion of a rotary dial (1 and 2) permitted a dial lock in hole 3 to effectively disable unauthorized access to the telephone network without preventing access to the emergency number 112. The same choice also maximized dialing speed. Additionally, in accordance to the previous point, prior to DTMF it was possible to dial "1" by shortly activating the hook, so repeatedly pushing the hook might result in calling 1-1-1. For this reason, Germany's police department emergency number was changed from 111 into 110.
Read more about this topic: 112 (emergency Telephone Number)
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