TAKING HELLO FOR GRANTED

On a recent Saturday morning, I found myself at the Edison Museum in Menlo Park, NJ. When you’re married to a man who holds degrees in both architecture and engineering, you often wind up at such places on those Saturdays when you can’t escape to an RWA chapter meeting. Unfortunately, we arrived at the extremely small, extremely cramped building at exactly the same time as a group of hyperactive cub scouts. (Note to all scout leaders reading this: When DO NOT TOUCH fails, handcuffs are a viable solution.) Fortunately, the cubs soon departed, leaving both the museum and the curator shaken but still standing.

You may be wondering what this has to do with writing. Several years ago I read a mainstream quasi-romance with a subplot concerning Nikola Tesla. I have always been fascinated by books that incorporate historical figures and events into fiction. Sometimes the author takes tremendous liberties; other times he or she has unearthed little-known facts and woven an intriguing plot around them. Knowing that Tesla and Edison shared a history, I asked the curator to corroborate some of the information in the book.

Curators love to share their knowledge, and after twenty excruciating minutes with the cub scouts from hell, this curator was ready for some intellectual discourse. One thing led to another until at one point he asked, “Did you know that Thomas Edison invented the word “hello”?

Say what?

Around 1877, Edison was working with Alexander Graham Bell to perfect the telephone. When the phone rang, Bell would answer by saying, “Hoi, hoi!” For some reason this bugged the heck out of Thomas Alva, who had the reputation of being a foul-mouthed prankster. So Edison began answering the phone with hell-o, a made-up word that he knew would shock Victorian sensibilities. Amazingly, the word caught on even though some dictionaries during the early years of its use defined it as a vulgar greeting.

I was so fascinated by this story, that I did a bit of research when I returned home. Shakespeare used aloo in King Lear and hollo in Titus Andronicus. Halloo, dating back to about 1700, was a cry used to urge on hunting dogs and is likely the basis of hallo, a cry of surprise dating to 1840. However the first recorded use of hello was in 1883. Since Edison takes credit for much he didn’t actually invent (he merely perfected the light bulb and bought motion picture technology), it’s not surprising, given his personality, that he would take something Old World, “Edisonfy” it, and have himself a good laugh over its acceptance by the general populace.

So keep this little piece of trivia in mind the next time you’re tempted to have your 17th century hero greet his true love’s father with a handshake and a hearty, “Hello, sir.”