When you pick up the phone, most people will say “halo“. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the use of the word “hello” was first introduced in 1827.
However, the context of its use at the time was not when receiving a call. The word “hello” at that time was not really a greeting.
Author tHe first phone bookAmmon Shea said, “hello” or Hello in English, it’s a new word.
Ammon said people in the 1830s used the word hello to get attention or express surprise. The word hello didn’t become a greeting until the telephone was invented.
The history of using “Hello” when receiving a call
In fact, the man credited with inventing the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, thought a more appropriate word for answering the telephone would be “ahoy.” This is explained in NPR.
To say ahoy apparently much older than Hello. Her age is about 100 years older.
To say ahoy it is also a greeting, although it is more used in coastal areas. It comes from the Dutch “hoi” which means hello.
However, the Edison era has made the word hello beat out its competitors. When Thomas Alfa Edison invented the phonograph, the voice recorder, he shouted a loud “halo” into the horn.
On August 15, 1877, Edison sent a letter to the president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Company, Pittsburgh, Mr. David. In his letter, he explains the privilege of using hello when speaking on the phone.
At the time, David was introducing the phone to the public. This moment between the experimentation of the phonograph and the correspondence between Edison and David marked its use Hello in sostitution Hello.
So it can be said, the figure who actually popularized the use of the word halo or Hello it’s Thomas Edison. It has been claimed that he encourages people to say hello when answering calls.
Also, in the book written by Ammon, it was explained that in the past telephone directories contained a “How To” chapter and hello was often agreed upon as a greeting.
Indeed, the world’s first telephone directory was published by the District Telephone Company of New Haven in 1878 directing users to initiate a telephone conversation with the word “hulloa”.
Anyway, in the end, the hello got rid of ahoy at the beginning of a telephone conversation.
The popularity of the word “Hello”
The word “hello” gains popularity in conversation after 1878, as explained in ScienceABC.
However, Mark Twain’s 1880 cartoon titled A telephone conversation it is the first literature to mention the word “hello” in the context of the telephone greeting. Furthermore, even a meeting of telephone companies in 1880 in New York showed a positive impression of the president’s speech which contained a single message in the form of “Hello”.
So say hello (halo) is registered as a sign that communication via telephone has been established.
In the past, there were also telephone operators called “hello girls”. A cartoon by Mark Twain in 1889 titled A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s courtt never shows these operators.
Bilingual “hello girls” operators (in French and English) work as operators contact center during the First World War to improve the quality of communication.
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