| New Zealand Gets an Emergency Number - 111 |
| Following the success of the 999
emergency number which had been in use in Britain since the 1930s,
the system was introduced by the NZ Post Office in September 1958 when the
first 111 service began in the Masterton/Carterton area.
The number 111 was used in New Zealand because the telephone equipment used in this country had a dial which was numbered in the opposite direction to those in Britain. (i.e. in NZ the numbers ran from 1 to 0 whereas in Britain they ran from 9 to 0.) Mechanically the systems were identical - the number (111 or 999) involved a full rotation of the phone dial for each digit.
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