Today in 1877, Thomas Edison coined the word “Hello” as a telephone greeting and as an alternative to “Ahoy!” suggested by telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell.
This was the successful resolution to “one of the first crises of techno-etiquette,” i.e., how to start a telephone conversation. In 1992, The New York Times’ William Grimes wrote about Allen Koenigsberg, a classics professor at Brooklyn College, who found at the AT&T archives a letter dated August 15, 1877, written by Edison and addressed to T.B.A. David, president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company in Pittsburgh:
Mr. David was preparing to introduce the telephone to that city. At the time, Edison envisioned the telephone as a business device only, with a permanently open line to parties at either end. This setup raised a problem: How would anyone know that the other party wanted to speak? Edison addressed the issue as follows: Friend David, I don't think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What do you think? EDISON
…The first public exchange, opened in New Haven on Jan. 28, 1878, wavered between "hello" and the fusty "What is wanted?" in its manual. By 1880, "hello" had won out.
…[Frederick Perry Fish, president of AT&T, said in 1907] "Well, Mr. Edison did away with that un-American way of doing things… He caught up a receiver one day and yelled into the transmitter one word -- a most satisfactory, capable, soul-satisfying word -- 'Hello.' It has gone clear around the world."
…When Edison discovered the principle of recorded sound on July 18, 1877, he shouted "Halloo!" into the mouthpiece of the strip phonograph. The word was the traditional call to incite hounds to the chase, and is a close relative of such words as hilla, hillo, halloa and hallo, all used to hail from a distance.
…It seems likely that Edison, satisfied with the resonant halloo, continued to use it in his experiments, at some point compressing the pronunciation and modifying the spelling, never his strong suit, in any case.
Mr. Koenigsberg said he would still like to know what exactly was going through Edison's mind at the moment of creation. For satisfaction, he will have to turn to one of the first songs to use the Edisonian greeting, "Hello, Central. Give Me Heaven."