Inventor Thomas Edison is widely credited with making the word 'hello' the standard telephone greeting, winning a weird linguistic turf war against Alexander Graham Bell.

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Inventor Thomas Edison is widely credited with making the word 'hello' the standard telephone greeting, winning a weird linguistic turf war against Alexander Graham Bell. When the telephone was first commercialized, Bell passionately insisted that people should answer calls by shouting 'ahoy,' which is objectively a much funnier and infinitely more nautical way to start a conversation. Edison, being the pragmatic killjoy that he was, felt that a loud, clear 'hello' was easier to hear over the static of early, terrible telephone lines. The public eventually sided with Edison's boring efficiency, completely robbing modern society of the joy of answering spam calls from telemarketers by screaming pirate lingo into the receiver. We could have been living in a glorious maritime utopia where businessmen say ahoy to each other on conference calls, but Edison had to ruin it with basic common sense