Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 14, 1992 TAG: 9203140310
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: WILLIAM GRIMES THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The word "hello," it appears, came straight from the fertile brain of the wizard of Menlo Park, N.J., who concocted the sonorous syllables to resolve one of the first crises of techno-etiquette: What do you say to start a telephone conversation?
Two contemporaries of Edison credited him with the word, but too vaguely for Allen Koenigsberg, a classics professor at Brooklyn College who has a passion for early phonographs and their history.
Resolved to sort out the "hello" mystery, Koenigsberg embarked on a tortuous search five years ago that led him, finally and triumphantly, to the American Telephone and Telegraph Co. Archives in lower Manhattan, where he found an unpublished letter by Edison.
Dated Aug. 15, 1877, it is addressed to one TBA David, president of the Central District and Printing Telegraph Co. in Pittsburgh.
David was preparing to introduce the telephone to that city.
At the time, Edison envisioned the telephone as a business device only, with a permanently open line to parties at either end. This setup raised a problem: How would anyone know that the other party wanted to speak? Edison addressed the issue as follows:
Friend David,
I don't think we shall need a call bell as Hello! can be heard 10 to 20 feet away. What do you think?
EDISON
It was a word of destiny. Over at the laboratories of Edison's rival, Bell was insisting on "Ahoy!" as the correct way to answer the telephone.
It was trounced by "hello," which became the standard as the first telephone exchanges, equipped by Edison, were set up across the United States and operating manuals adopted the word.
The first public exchange, opened in New Haven on Jan. 28, 1878, wavered between "hello" and the fusty "What is wanted?" in its manual. By 1880, "hello" had won out.
Like the telephone, the punchy "hello" was a liberator and a social leveler.
"The phone overnight cut right through the 19th-century etiquette that you don't speak to anyone unless you've been introduced," Koenigsberg said. And "hello" was the edge of the blade.
"If you think about it," he said, "why didn't Stanley say hello to Livingston? The word didn't exist." Neither did the simple and elegant "dude," so Stanley was thrown back on the formal "Dr. Livingston, I presume."
When Edison discovered the principle of recorded sound on July 18, 1877, he shouted "Halloo!" into the mouthpiece of the strip phonograph. The word was the traditional call to incite hounds to the chase, and is a close relative of such words as hilla, hillo, halloa and hallo, all used to hail from a distance.
The British "hullo," which dates from the mid-19th century, is deceptive. It was used not as a greeting but as an expression of surprise, as in "Hullo, what have we here?"
It seems likely that Edison, satisfied with the resonant halloo, continued to use it in his experiments, at some point compressing the pronunciation and modifying the spelling, never his strong suit, in any case.
Koenigsberg said he would still like to know what exactly was going through Edison's mind at the moment of creation.
For satisfaction, he will have to turn to one of the first songs to use the Edisonian greeting, "Hello, Central. Give Me Heaven."
by CNB