Phones didn't always look the way it did today. In 1960, it was the beginning of the end for rotary dialing. Buttons were soon about to become the future. Except, the design of the phone was tough. They didn't know what to include. And there were a lot of options:

How many? A lot:

The folks at Bell Labs ran tests with hundreds of dialers and kept an eye out on which were the fastest, most accurate and most preferred.

Imagine if one of those at the top became the phone we have today? [Numberphile]