Who invented hello for telephone

It was a written system of symbols designed to help deaf while speaking. Bell dedicated his life to studying and making inventions for the aid of those with hearing and speaking disabilities.

His mother and wife were both deaf and this inspired him to work with principles of acoustics and make contributions to help them. He was not the only person to have invented the talking telegraph. Fellow inventor Elisha Gray was also experimenting on similar concepts.

See Today's Synonym. We use hello several times a day to greet people or attract attention. But as prevalent as the word is, it is relatively new. Hello is considered a variant on a number of other similar words—like hallo, holla, and hollo —that were used to hail and shout to gain attention and recorded prior to the s.

For example, the word hallo demanded that the listener come to a stop or cease what he or she was doing. It was also used to spur on hunting dogs. Amazingly, there are countless variations of these words, including: halloo , halloa , halow , hillo , holler , hollo , holloa , hollow , and hullo. Stranger is the story that telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell chose hello as a phone greeting because it was the name of his girlfriend, one Margaret Hello.

She never existed — Bell developed the telephone while he was engaged to Mabel Hubbard, and she would be his wife until his death in For many land-bound Americans, the nautical ahoy would have been awkward or even unknown. Hello had been gaining popularity around the country over the preceding 50 years and so would have come more naturally to many. I was standing all by myself in the committee room, reading a vast law book and wondering what it was about, and whether the plaintiff had done so and so, or whether it was the defendant; and which of them they found guilty; and how the mischief they ever knew he was guilty when the words were tangled up so; and noting, with gratification, the references to Perkins v.

Bangs , Mo. This young man had a moustache that dimmed the lightness of his countenance about as your breath dims the brightness of a razor; and he bored down into it with his fingers and gave it a twist which was singularly gratifying to him, considering that no effect was produced upon the moustache by the operation. He then tilted his little soup-dish to the port side of his head with his gloved hand, and said:. I was just finishing a sentence about Perkins v.

What I want to know is, are you, or are you not, the clerk of the Judiciary Committee? He scratched his head in apparent perplexity for a matter of five seconds, and then said, with deliberation and impressive earnestness:. I hope so. Thomas Edison himself claimed to have initiated the use of hello upon receiving a phone call—which required people to address an unseen and unknown person. Hello obviously caught on, and spread along with the telephone.

But had the actual inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, had his way, our greetings might be very different today.

Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free! Log in Sign Up. Don't answer the phone with 'ahoy'.