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*****

SHOW:  All Things Considered

DATE:  March 19, 1999

LINDA WERTHEIMER, host:

Once the telephone was perfected, people had to learn to use it.  There was a
very fundamental question to be answered, one that seems quite odd to us
today,
and that is: What do you say when you answer a ringing telephone?

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

Allen Koenigsberg is a professor of classics at Brooklyn College and an expert
in the life of Alexander Graham Bell's rival, Thomas Edison.  He says the two
great men had different notions about how to let a caller know that you'd
picked up the phone.

Professor ALLEN KOENIGSBERG: When Bell invented the phone, Alexander Graham
Bell, he didn't use `hello' at all.  He used `ahoy.' He used it twice, `Ahoy.
Ahoy.' And apparently he was the only one that used it, because I've never
heard anybody to this day say, `Ahoy.' And Bell was not even in the Navy, so I
don't know why he insisted on using a call that way.  But if you study the
origin of the word `hello,' which may come from `halloo,' is the call of a
ferry boat operator, and you call them over when you want a ferry boat to come
to your doorstep.  And you say, `Halloo.' So the word may have come from
that.
Hello just began to be used all over the place, and by the 1880s, it was
fairly
popular.

It seems like one of those words that is around in the soundscape forever, but
most dictionaries said that it originated in the 1880s, but the telephone was
invented in the 1870s.  So I wondered what was being said on the phone when
they were first hooked up.  And my research led to the discovery of a document
at the AT&T archives in which Edison wrote in 1877 that he thought the word
`hello' should be used for opening a telephonic conversation.

(Excerpt from song)

Prof.  KOENIGSBERG: It was kind of a riddle in a way, because when you hook up
a telephone and you are speaking basically to a stranger, it ran counter to
what people expected in their day-to-day meetings, which was their previous
experience.  And you have to be properly introduced.  And you're never
introduced on the telephone that way.  So you have to find a word or a phrase
that very quickly cuts to the chase and allows people to start speaking, and
`hello' was pressed into service.

(Excerpts from vintage recordings)

Prof.  KOENIGSBERG: What's unusual about `hello' in the United States is that
words that are used in other countries for greetings on the telephone--like in
Italy, `Pronto,' or in Japan, (Japanese expression)--never move to everyday
speech, person to person.  The word stays for the purpose that it's intended,
on the telephone.  But `hello' in America is used both on the telephone and in
everyday speech.  I think it's the only country where a particular word was
able to bridge both forms.

(Excerpt from vintage recording)

Prof.  KOENIGSBERG: I even got interested in the history of the `hello' badge,
which, you know, when you go to a convention, you see all over the place.
`Hello, my name is.' And I think I've actually determined the date and
location
of the invention of the first `hello' badge, which was in 1880 at Niagara
Falls, which was the site of the first telephone operators convention.  And I
found the minutes of the meeting, and in there he's very proud to see that
they're all wearing their name tags.  And he says, `We have a new word to go
on
our name tags, the word "hello."' But I've been looking for years, being a
collector, for an example of the first `hello' badge from--it will say,
`Niagara Falls, Telephone Operators Convention, September 1880.' So somewhere
out there I'm sure one of your listeners has it in a drawer, and I would be
delighted to see it.

SIEGEL: Edison expert Allen Koenigsberg.

(Excerpt from vintage recording)

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