You probably know that Thomas Edison is credited with inventing the light bulb, much to the anger of many Tesla-lovers on the Internet. One thing he for sure didn't invent, though, was the telephone. That one goes to Alexander Graham Bell. When the first phone call was made by Bell, his famous words were “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.”
There was no greeting to it, and Bell
proposed using “ahoy ahoy” as the standard greeting. Ahoy stuck around until
Edison suggested a simple “hello.” Obviously, it caught on. Edison is sometimes
falsely credited as inventing the word “hello” itself, but variants of it had
been used throughout the 19th century.
