Thomas Edison suggests using the word hello as a telephone greeting. The salutation is now used the world over, in one form or another.
Alexander Graham Bell’s famous first words, in 1876—“Mr. Watson, come here”—were delivered with no greeting at all (see here). Bell soon proposed ahoy, ahoy, the age-old seafarer’s hail. And ahoy was the first greeting used, until Edison suggested hello.
The phone was conceived of as a business machine to connect two offices with a permanently open line. Some people toyed with the idea of an alarm bell at each end to alert one office that the other wanted to speak. On August 15, 1877, Edison wrote to a friend who was setting up a phone system in Pittsburgh: “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 did not coin the word. Halloo and variants had been used for ages to urge on hunting hounds and to shout to people at a distance. Edison was tinkering with a prototype phonograph in 1877 and used a shouted halloo! for testing. Early gramophones and telephones alike had pretty low signal-to-noise ratios.
Hello itself turns up in a number of places prior to 1877, including Mark Twain’s Roughing It, published four years before Bell called Watson. Earlier references also exist, one dating back to at least 1826. In any case, hello caught on quickly and entered the dictionary in 1883. And when was the last time you had to look up that spelling?—TL