BULB AND HELLO
“Mr. Watson — Come here — I want to see you.”- these were the first intelligible words spoken over the telephone after it was discovered by the great Alexander Graham Bell, his patent registers it back in 7th march 1876. Almost after 140 yrs of discovery, the word we all use to start a conversation is “HELLO”. The telephone evolved over generations seeing type pads, touch pads, smart phones and even holographic types but the word “HELLO” has never changed. Why? According to our title, is bulb someway connected with this?
Absolutely yes! Not the bulb directly, but its inventor Thomas Edison (after 1000 attempts) is the reason behind this trend. There are several myths floating around stating hello is the name used by Bell to call his wife and he made the first telephonic call to his wife so that word became a code to start the conversation. Nope, neither his wife’s name was hello nor did he make the first call to her. He rather insisted on saying “AHOY” to start with. But what he expected didn’t happen- that’s the harsh truth! (That’s the concept of our beautiful life…..)
According to the Oxford dictionary, the first published use of hello goes back only to 1827- interesting isn’t it. In the 1830s people used hello just to gain attention (hello brother, what are u writing?) or to express surprise (hello, what is your problem?). It was never used as greeting then. It all started only when the telephones arrived. The dictionary says it was first put to common use by Edison. He used to urge people to use the word “HELLO” to start the conversation with him. Later this became the trend and is still followed! Now the question is why didn’t people follow the inventor’s idea of using “AHOY” itself? Also ahoy was in use almost 100yrs before hello. The reason why hello succeeded over ahoy is because of the telephone books.
The telephone books started to have the “reader’s manual” section on how to use the telephone to communicate. In all those pages they included the word “hello” as a standard protocol to start a conversation. It became the official greeting then. Sources reveal that the first telephone directory published in 1878 (two yrs after the invention of telephone) urged people to use hello when the make or pick up a call just like a code.
Also researches show that people like to use the word hello when compared to ahoy is because hello is a light word, not stressed and doesn’t express much emotion like that of ahoy. People even compared the word ahoy with “eureka” saying both the expression look similar- funny isn’t it, but even to me it feels the same! All this helped “hello” to win over “ahoy” and added another feather to the cap of Edison. I even feel this might be one of the strongest reasons for Bell to be called his rival in the history.
So many such interesting stories revolve around the common things that we do in our day to day busy life. Next time you call a person, remember the importance of the first word that you are using and how it led to a small cold war in those days.
