Today in Technology History
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August 15
Technology has a profound effect on the way we speak. Sometimes it gives us entirely new words (like gyroscope or electroencephalograph). Sometimes it gives new meanings to old words (like computer and printer, both of which applied to people long before they applied to machines). And a change in technology is responsible for a word you probably hear several times every day: hello.
The telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in the 1870s. As the invention became popular, its users found that they needed a signal for starting a conversation -- especially since some early phone lines were left permanently connected and open.
People experimented with lots of different telephone salutations, including the following: "What is wanted?" "Are you there?" "Are you ready to talk?"
Dr. Bell himself wanted telephone calls to start with "Hoy, hoy!" Depending on whom you believe, Bell's preferred salutation was derived either from a Gaelic greeting (Bell was born in Scotland) or from the nautical term "Ahoy." (Fans of the TV show "The Simpsons" may have noticed that the character Mr. Burns, an old man whose vocabulary includes many obsolete words, always answers the telephone by saying "Ahoy-hoy.")
But Bell's greeting was a flop. Instead, phone users followed the suggestion made by that other great inventor, Thomas Edison. It was long believed that Edison had coined the word "hello," and in the 1980s, a scholar named Allen Koenigsberg found proof. He discovered a letter Edison wrote to Mr. T.B.A. David, president of Pittsburgh's Central District and Printing Telegraph Company. That letter, dated August 15, 1877 (exactly 125 years ago today) includes the first known written use of the word "hello."
With Edison's endorsement, the word "hello" soon became the accepted telephone greeting -- and eventually a normal greeting for meetings in person, too.
Related links:
Click here to read more about Koenigsberg's discovery of Edison's "hello" letter./
We have written before about the effect of technology on words. Use these links to read about the history of the words anesthesia, robot and tarmac.
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