Conventional wisdom has long held that Thomas Alva Edison should be credited with the word “hello” as the more correct way to answer a new telephone call. Once again, conventional wisdom appears not to be as clear as it seems. It is not surprising that, when it comes to Edison’s inventions, he always assumes for himself until proof that someone else has really done the work, and Edison only took credit for it.
Alexander Graham Bell did not invent the telephone in a vacuum. He built the work of others at exactly the same time that Elisha Gray built the telephone. One of the great stories in the history of invention is that of Gray’s campaign to patent office all hours and the fruits of labor imposed by both men. There is doubt about the validity of this story. There is little doubt that Alexander Graham Bell would have preferred that those responding to his invention do so with the words “Ahoy, Hoy” or something similar. The first telephone operators answered their lines in this way, and things seem to be related to Bell’s preference. Apart from the fact that the first operators are located on the East Coast which has a strong tradition of navigation and its technology terminology was easily accepted by the users.
The story of “Ahoy, Hoy” is a phone call from “The Simpsons”. The richest and oldest resident of Springfield, the cartoon home town, is one C. Montgomery Burns. One of the terrific traits of Mr. Ardens’s genius is his tendency to use old words for modern technology and he has done this on a few occasions answered the phone in the style preferred by Bell.
Not everyone stuck with “Ahoy, Hoy” while the Lord was Burning, however. In fact, about a decade before the telephone, “Ahoy, Hoy” would be almost entirely eclipsed by “Hello.” This is where Edison’s tendency to take credit for what he didn’t do, he admits, enters the room for debate as to whether he really told the truth about the change. But at first he was troubled.
A writer by the name of Heinz Insu Fenk published a commentary entitled “Heaven and Hail” in which he considers the origin of the word “hail” from a purely theological perspective. It is a brilliantly written and deeply fascinating piece that ultimately demands the idea that this most common of greetings has an etymology that can ultimately be translated into the meaning or “Behold the light.” or Hell below. I absolutely adore the theological involvement in the daily lives of millions, but the real story of “hello” seems to be another in a long line of stories where Thomas Edison proves the necessity of being forced to claim credit for himself. This may or may not be one of those rare cases where Edison had to do that.
The fact that so many articles were originally written and published on the Internet shows the power that goes with the story of Thomas Edison a>. Going back years before the internet began to take on a pervasive presence in our lives, a man named Allen Koenigsberg had already made a legacy that probably already settled the debate without confusingly published pieces of random wisdom accepted as the evangelical fact of conventional wisdom.
First of all, this is not the same Allan Konigsberg, who is much better known to the world as Woody Allen. Koenigsberg is a journalist who finds letters related to the origin of “hello” and then digs even deeper.
The story of Edison being responsible for the health of the common telephone at least and for the act of contaminating the word to many traces back to a quote from an ATT employee in a history book about Edison. Koenigsberg’s question also considers the irrevocable fact that Edison shouted the world “Halloo” in the phonographic download as early as 1877. What should also be considered is that Mark Twain provides the first known published work in which hello is used in a telephone conversation. . This work is an 1880 short work entitled “A Telephone Conversation”. Koenigsberg’s research also points to the fact that those telephone operators were the very first to be called “hello girls” and that at least 1885 some of the bell attendants were known to answer the phones with “hello”.
Didn’t Thomas Edison introduce the word “hello” into the world first as the preferred means of answering the phone and then as a general substitute for face to face greetings? that the world may never know. If Edison stole this idea from others, he was much more successful in concealing the fraud than he paper-trail”>paper-trail”>a> . saying to find a movie camera. If “hello” is that rare 1% of inspiration that can actually be credited to Thomas Edison, then he was surprisingly relaxed in using it for his legendary artificial device.
