Long before "hello" became the automatic way to answer a ringing phone, telephone users had no idea what to say when they picked up the receiver. In the late 1870s, as the wired telephone spread as a new and astonishing invention, callers responded in wildly different ways: some coughed into the receiver, some shouted "Hey! Who's there?" and others simply said nothing at all.
Call quality at the time made the problem worse. Lines crackled and hissed with interference, so telephone users needed a short, easily recognisable word that would immediately signal to the person on the other end that the connection had been made.
Bell's choice: a sailor's greeting
Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, proposed borrowing a maritime greeting for the job: "Ahoy!" In the 19th century, sailors commonly used the word to hail another ship or a person at a distance.
For an ordinary telephone conversation, though, "Ahoy!" sounded unusual to most people. Bell nonetheless stuck with his idea and reportedly kept answering his own telephone calls with it for a considerable time.
Edison's rival proposal
Bell's competitor, the inventor Thomas Edison, put forward a different answer. While experimenting with telephone equipment, Edison used the exclamation "Hullo!", a word that had long been used in English to catch someone's attention or call to them from a distance. Edison is widely credited as the person most closely tied to the origin of "hello" as a telephone greeting.
In 1877, he proposed in a letter that people use "Hello" to open telephone calls. The short, clear-sounding word suited the poor connections of the era far better than Bell's "Ahoy" and gradually began to replace it.
How "hello" caught on
By 1878, one of the earliest telephone directories, published in New Haven, was already advising subscribers to begin their calls with "Hulloa." As telephone use spread, the habit of saying "Hello" became increasingly entrenched.
The greeting also became linked to the switchboard operators at early telephone exchanges, who later earned the nickname "Hello Girls."
The word "hello" itself existed long before the telephone was invented. It began not as a greeting in the modern sense but as an exclamation similar in meaning to "hey!" or "ahoy!" It was the telephone that turned it into the standard way to open a conversation.
From "hello" to "allo"
As the English greeting spread into other languages, it changed form. French adopted "allô," which is still used today when answering a phone call. A similar version, "allo," later entered Ukrainian and other languages as well.
It is difficult now to imagine phone calls beginning any other way. Instead of the familiar "Hello, Mum!" callers today could just as easily have been greeting relatives with Bell's original choice: "Ahoy, Mum!"
