Almost everyone still believes that Alexander Graham Bell is the inventor of the telephone. While Bell did patent the telephone in 1876, and started up the first telecommunications business, named after himself, he was nothing more than the inventor of plagiarism (or so he (probably) said). The designs that Bell patented were those of Antonio Meucci, who demonstrated his telephone a full 16 years before Bell patented it. At the time, the Italian immigrant couldn’t afford to pay the $250 fee to patent his designs, and he only grew poorer as time passed. He had showed his design to the Western Union telegraph company, but the executives didn’t want to meet him. He was told his materials were lost and couldn’t be returned, and then 2 years later, his old lab partner Bell had patented them. Meucci sued Bell, but died before a verdict was reached. In 2002, US congress officially recognized him as the inventor, but still he goes largely unknown.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Jun 2013 19:35:43 +0000
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