The old pop song “Hello Ma Baby” (1899) invokes the early telephone phrase “Hello Central”. Also, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court opens one chapter cryptically for the modern reader where the Yankee’s wife exclaims “Hello-Central!” and you gradually find out she’s referring to their daughter. The kid was given that name after the Yankee said “Hello-Central” in his sleep. His medieval wife, not knowing what it meant, assumed it was the name of his former lover, so she named their daughter “Hello-Central” to please him.
This has always struck me as one of the very weirdest passages in all of Twain’s writing, and you know he wrote some very weird stuff. The whole thing is so preposterous I wonder who he thought he was putting on. (Well, I suppose the entire novel of ACYiKAC was an exercise in how preposterous a piece of fiction could get. Give me Pudd’nhead Wilson any day.)
I gather that when the telephone first appeared, you couldn’t dial direct. When you picked up the speaking-device, or whatever they called it, you didn’t get a dial tone but you reached the operator and asked her to connect you to the party you wanted to reach. When telephones were first installed in the 1880s, the way to get the operator’s attention was apparently “Hello Central.” I don’t know when this phrase died out.