Why do we say "Hello", picking up the phone?

Now we perceive a telephone as a perfectly ordinary thing and we can talk on it on any subject, but almost always the first word that we pronounce during a phone conversation is “hello”. 

Where did it come from and what does it mean? 

Back when telephony started to be introduced into our day-to-day life, everybody who used that novelty had to follow strict procedures. For a long time a phone has remained a working tool for a selected few, as a rule, business and powerful people. 

Alexander Bell is considered to be the inventor of a telephone, but the greatest contribution to the improvement of this apparatus and its popularization was made by an American inventor Thomas Edison. It was him who set the word with which a telephone conversation begins in about half of the countries in the world. 

In August 2000 Thomas Edison corresponded with the President of one of large telegraphic companies. One of the main themes of their talk was the regulation of negotiation by means of a sound signal transmitting and receiving device. Edison proposed to use “hello” as a word with which a conversation starts. Alexander Bell, for his part, proposed to used a word “ahoy” (the English-speaking marine greeting with the help of which the crews of ships greet each other, having met on the water). 

As you can see, among the general public precisely the first variant worked out. 

It’s interesting that a word “hello” became fashionable not in all countries. For example, picking up the phone in Japan, they say “mosi mosi” (“I speak”), in Greece – “parakalo” (“please”), in Spain – “diga” (“speak”).