Mark LaPorta asked:

Did anyone else notice that Thomas Edison invented the telephone? (IN the section on HELLO -- heard on the audible version).

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10 years ago
7 answers

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Ivan Zullo They were testing the readers focus. Test passed, congrats.

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Dubi It's unimaginable that an author this scholarly, as well as professional editors and proofreaders and fact checkers, could have missed so obvious an error without at least qualifying it to say that Edison said Hello when first testing his version of the telephone that had previously been invented by Bell. But it is true that Edison's use of Hello as a telephone greeting ended up popularizing the word Hello, outpacing Bell's Ahoy as the standard telephone greeting.

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Emily Edison invented a receiver to compete with the telephone invented by Bell. It was adopted in Britain, while the United States stuck with Bell's telephone receiver. I'm assuming that is why the author referred to Edison as the "inventor" of the telephone rather than saying something more like "when Edison tested his receiver". Or something like that.

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