The conventional wisdom has long asserted that Thomas Alva Edison should be credited with coming up with the word “hello” as a more proper way of answering a new invention called the telephone. The conventional wisdom appears once again to be not quite as clear as it would seem. Not that anyone should be surprised since when it comes to inventions of Edison, one must always assume until provided proof that somebody else actually did the work and Edison merely stepped in to take credit.
Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone in a vacuum. He built upon the work of others at exactly the same time that Elisha Gray was inventing the telephone. One of the great stories in the history of invention is that of Bell beating Gray to the patent office by mere hours and thus getting all the fruits of the labor put in by both men. There is some question as to the validity of this tale. What is less questionable is that that Alexander Graham Bell preferred that those answering his invention do so with the words “Ahoy, Hoy” or something similar. The first telephone operators answered their lines thusly and things seem to be headed toward Bell’s preference. Except that the first operators were situated on the East Coast which has a strong tradition of sailing and its terminology was readily acceptable to users of the technology.
The history of the “Ahoy, Hoy” phone greeting has been referenced on “The Simpsons.” The richest and oldest resident of Springfield, the home town of the cartoon, is one C. Montgomery Burns. One of the terrific character affections of Mr. Burns is a tendency to use archaic terms for modern technology and he has on a few occasions answered the phone on the style preferred by Bell.
Not everyone stuck with “Ahoy, Hoy” as long as Mr. Burns, however. In fact, the telephone would be around for about a decade before “Ahoy, Hoy” had almost been completely eclipsed by “Hello.” Here is where Edison’s tendency to claim credit something he didn’t do enters with, admittedly, room for debate over whether he was actually telling the truth for a change. But first a distraction.
A writer named Heinz Insu Fenk published an essay titled “Heaven and Hello” in which he considers the origin of the word “hello” from a purely theological perspective. It is a brilliantly written and utterly fascinating piece that ultimately postulates the concept that this most common of greetings has an etymology which eventually be translated as meaning either “Behold light!” or “Hell below.” I absolutely adore the theological implication of such a mundane element in the everyday life of millions, but it would appear that the real story of “hello” is just another in the long line of stories where Thomas Edison proves to be compulsively driven to claim credit for himself. This may or may not be one of those rare cases where Edison was right to do so.
The fact that so many articles written for and published originally on the internet indicates the strength which with the myth of Thomas Edison persists. Way back in years before the internet starting assuming a pervasive presence in ours lives, a fellow named Allen Koenigsberg had already done the legwork that would probably have settled the debate by now without the confusion wrought by published pieces blindly accepting conventional wisdom as gospel fact.
In the first place, this is not the same Allan Konigsberg who is much better known to the world as Woody Allen. Koenigsberg is a journalist who found a letter relating to the origin of “hello” and then dug even deeper.
The story that Edison was responsible for making hello the common telephone greeting at least and for actually coining the word at most traces back to a quotation from an ATT employee in a historical book about Edison. Koenigsberg quest also takes into consideration the incontrovertible fact that Edison shouted the world “Halloo” onto a phonographic strip as early as 1877. What must also be considered is that Mark Twain provides the first known published work in which hello is used in a telephone conversation. That work is the 1880 short work titled “A Telephone Conversation.” Koenigsberg research also throws in the fact that those early telephone operators were very early on referred to as “hello girls” and that by at least 1885 some employees of the Bell company were known to be answering phones with the “hello” greeting.
Did Thomas Edison introduce the word “hello” to world first as the preferred means for answering the phone and then as a general replacement for face to face greetings? The world may never know. If Edison did steal this idea from others, he was much more successful in hiding the paper trail of his deceit than he was in claiming to invent the movie camera. If “hello” is that rare 1% of inspiration that can actually be credited to Thomas Edison, then he was surprisingly lax in utilizing it to construct his artificial edifice of self myth.
