Why do we answer the phone with hello

Watson, come here — I want you. Though we credit Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the telephone whether or not he wass, is still up for debate , a different inventor is credited with coining the typical phone greeting. Thomas Edison! The same guy who is credited with inventing the light bulb. Yep, I said credited again.

It turns out, those who we think of as the best inventors of time are often invention developers with the best PR of all time! I digress. It was expected to be a line of business communication between two parties that was left as an open line. If the caller wanted the person on the other end of the line to know they would like to speak, some sort of greeting would need to occur.

It was Edison who equipped the first telephone exchanges, so he ended up having the last say. According to The New York Times ,. Koenigsberg embarked on a tortuous search five years ago that led him, finally and triumphantly, to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company Archives in lower Manhattan, where he found an unpublished letter by Edison. Dated Aug. David was preparing to introduce the telephone to that city. Where does hello come from? What about other greetings? Unlock a new world of learning!

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Redefine your inbox with Dictionary. Illustration by Thomas Nast, Library of Congress. There is weight behind the idea that Thomas Edison is the forefather of introducing hello as salutation into common vernacular. It seems that the word hello had existed in the English language for long before Edison used it to create sound experiments. It can be said, fairly, that Edison had a hand in bringing hello from a word of surprise to a word of greeting, changing the way we answer the phone and changing the meaning of a word forever.

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