Thomas Edison suggests using the word "hello" as a telephone greeting - August 15th, 1877

On this day in 1877, Thomas Edison proposed saying “hello” when greeting someone on the telephone.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio, Ohoy,
and Welcome to This Day in History Class, a show
that answers the call of history every day of the week.
I'm Gay, Blues Yay, and today we're looking at how
the Wizard of Menlo Park helped resolve one of the

(00:20):
first questions of telephone etiquette, what do you say when
someone picks up the phone? The answer wasn't as clear
cut as you might expect. The day was August fifteenth,
eighteen seventy seven. Thomas Edison proposed saying hello when greeting

(00:46):
someone on the telephone. The phone had been invented only
one year earlier, and at the time it was thought
of mostly as a business tool. The system worked much
like an early version of walkie talkies. When two phones
were can they formed a line of communication that was
permanently open. That way, an employee in one office could

(01:07):
simply speak into the phone's mouthpiece and be immediately heard
through the phone in a different office. The only problem
was there was no way to alert a person on
one side that someone on the other side wanted to
have a conversation. Some offices considered installing alarm bells to
get each other's attention, but renowned inventor Thomas Edison suggested

(01:29):
a different approach. He did so in a letter to
TBA David, the president of the Central District and Printing
Telegraph Company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. David was preparing to set
up a telephone system in his home city and had
reached out to his friend Thomas Edison for advice on
best practices. In a response dated August fifteenth, eighteen seventy seven,

(01:53):
Edison told him quote, friend David, I do not think
we shall need a call bell, as Hello can be
heard ten to twenty feet away. What you think, given
how ubiquitous Hello is today, you might imagine that it's
been the standard English language greeting for as long as
people have been speaking English. In reality, though the word's

(02:16):
been in use for less than two centuries of the
one thousand year history of English. That said, the etymology
of hello can be traced back much farther. The word hail,
for instance, has been used as a greeting or salutation
since the Middle Ages, and it was still in use
by the time of the Renaissance. In fact, William Shakespeare

(02:38):
used it in two ways as a greeting like in
the line hail to your grace, and as a form
of praise Hail Caesar. From there, several variants emerged, including hollow, hallohillo,
and holler. Around the same time, the British began shouting halloo,

(02:59):
both to attract the attention of someone at a distance
and to urge on hounds during a hunt. Another British term,
hello with a U, is a bit trickier. According to
the Oxford English Dictionary, the word hello first appeared in
the early nineteenth century, but it wasn't primarily used as

(03:19):
a greeting. Instead, it was an expression of surprise, as in, well, hello,
what have we here? Still? With all those similar sounding
greetings floating around, it was only a matter of time
before someone spelled the word with an e. The first
known use of hello in print comes from an eighteen

(03:39):
twenty six issue of a Connecticut newspaper, The Norwich Courier.
The sentence in question read Hello, Jim, I'll tell you
what I've a sharp knife and feel as if I'd
like to cut up something or other. From then on,
hello and hello were used interchangeably, usually as a way
to flag someone down or to convey surprise. It wasn't

(04:02):
until the late nineteenth century that the word caught on
is in everyday greeting, and according to some historians, that
boom in popularity may never have happened without Thomas Edison
and the telephone. It's clear that Edison didn't invent the
word hello, but we can make an educated guess about
why he suggested using it on the telephone. In July

(04:24):
of eighteen seventy seven, while tinkering with a prototype phonograph,
Edison famously shouted helloo into the mouthpiece. If he liked
what he heard, The inventor may have continued using the
greeting in his other experiments with recorded sound. Then, when
he was asked how to start a conversation on the telephone,
he may have just thrown out his go to greeting,

(04:46):
spelling it with an E instead of an A. Of course,
using Hello as a greeting had other appeals besides Edison's endorsement.
For one thing, it was much simpler and snappier than
other greetings used in the early day of the telephone,
such as do I get you? And are you there?
The only other real contender was the word a hoy

(05:08):
a nautical greeting that had been in use for at
least a century longer than Hello. The actual inventor of
the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, wanted to use a hoy
as the standard greeting, and while he did get his
way for a time, Edison's suggestion eventually won out. The
thing that really sealed the deal for Hello was the

(05:29):
publication of the first phone book in eighteen seventy eight.
The how to section at the front of the book
suggested two choices for a greeting, the formal question what
is wanted and the much friendlier Hello. The same suggestion
was made in the operating manuals of the first public
telephone exchanges, which it's worth noting were equipped by Thomas Edison.

(05:53):
The manual's recommendation on how to end a phone conversation
by saying that is all was less excess. Over the
next few years, telephone service widened exponentially, necessitating the use
of switchboards and switchboard operators to connect and coordinate the calls.
Many of those operators, all of whom were women, greeted

(06:15):
their callers with a simple Hello, and those interactions helped
cement the words use in the public's mind. In fact,
the greeting became so closely linked with telephones that people
started calling the operators Hello girls. Thanks to Edison and
the Hello Girls, the greeting seems to have beaten out
ahoy by as early as eighteen eighty. That was the

(06:37):
year when Mark Twain published a comedic sketch called A
Telephonic Conversation, which included the first known use of the
word hello in literature, a sure sign that the greeting
was in common use by then. It's fair to say
that Thomas Edison helped change the meaning of the word
Hello from an exclamation of surprise to an everyday greeting.

(06:59):
But one per person who never got on board with
the idea was Alexander Graham Bell. He stuck to his
guns and continued using a whoy as his telephone greeting
of choice for the rest of his life. I'm Gabe
Lucier and hopefully you now know a little more about
history today than you did yesterday. If you'd like to

(07:21):
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send your feedback directly by writing to This Day at
iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show,
and thanks to you for listening. I'll see you back

(07:43):
here again tomorrow for another day in History class