Year 1875, Thomas Christopherson’s home.
Thomas was a scientist in France. He had just finished making a machine that could possibly enable him to talk to a person at a far off place with a similar machine.
He picked up the instrument, dialled some number.
He heard “Trrrrrinnnng, Trrrrrinnng, Trrrrrinnnng….”
Cut to Alexander Bell’s home. Mr. Bell is working furiously on a machine, similar to Thomas’s, in his lab. It suddenly starts making this funny ringing sound, “Trrrrrinnnng, Trrrrrinnng, Trrrrrinnnng….”.
Bell’s assistant, Watson, urges Bell to do something to stop the horrible noise. Bell lifts a piece of the instrument which was connected to a bulky music player-kinda base through a wire. The ringing noise stops.
Cut to Thomas’s house. The ringing noise that Thomas was hearing had stopped and there was complete silence. Thomas could hear some noise from the other side.
On the other side, Bell and Watson were talking to each other in English trying to figure out how the sound had stopped.
Alas, Thomas did not know English, he thought it was some static signal he was getting.
A year later, on March 10, 1876, in Bell’s lab.
Bell had realized that the ringing noise he got an year back was actually the first phone call ever and that there was no conversation purely because there was no agreed upon protocol of speaking. For the last one year, Watson and Bell had many serious brain-storming sessions on what should be the protocol. Mrs. Bell had to stop them many times from entering into a fist fight. She would barge in saying "HELLO! there is a lady in this house, Don’t you have no manners?”. Only yesterday they both had reached the decision that the one word they had heard most in the last year should be the starting word in this protocol. And this came “Hello”.
Yes, of course it also helped that both Watson and Bell knew English and what Hello meant. Poor Thomas, if only he had learnt English.
PS: Of course, it is another matter that Watson and Bell had heard each other in that iconic telephone conversation purely because they both were loud guys and the wall separating them was made of thin layer of single bricks with lots of holes drilled into it.
PS:PS: You may doubt the validity of this story, you are welcome to Google for it or go to this web-link.
