![]() He appeared close to winning when the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and proceedings against the Scot to annul the patent were begun in January 1887. Suspecting that Bell had hijacked his ideas, Meucci sued. He subsequently struck a lucrative deal with Western Union, which made him wealthy, and a celebrity. Two years later Bell, said to have worked in the laboratory where Meucci’s notes, diagrams and prototype devices were stored, filed a patent for a telephone. When he asked for his materials to be returned, in 1874, he was told they had been lost. He sent a model and technical details to the American District Telegraph Company, a subsidiary of Western Union based in New York, but failed to generate much interest. Three years later he could not even find the $10 for the patent caveat. Instead, in 1871, he filed a patent caveat - one-year renewable notice of an impending patent. Meucci quickly made another device but could not afford the $250 needed for a definitive patent. Meanwhile, needing to pay for treatment for her illness, Esterre sold his prototype machines to a second-hand goods shop for $6. It did not help that he was badly burned in an accident aboard a steamship, which further impacted on his ability to earn money. ![]() His limited English made it difficult for him to find American backers, while most of his Italian friends, including the unification hero Giuseppe Garibaldi, were not from moneyed backgrounds. He improved and developed his device but his candle factory went bankrupt, which meant he had no funds to invest. ![]() It was this device that he demonstrated in public in 1860, attracting sufficient interest that New York's Italian-language newspaper carried the story.īut events conspired against Meucci. He devised a system, using copper wire, whereby Esterre could communicate with him by a rudimentary telephone linking to his workshop. In one respect, this provided an opportunity. His personal circumstances changed, however, when severe rheumatoid arthritis left his wife paralysed and in need of care. He had considerable savings from his time in Cuba, which he invested in a tallow candle factory. Realising there was commercial potential in what he had stumbled upon, he moved to the United States in 1850, acquiring a house at Staten Island, near New York City, where he set up a workshop in the basement. In helping to further this research, he discovered by accident that sounds could travel by electrical impulses through copper wire. He married costume designer Esterre Mochi, who worked at the same theatre, in 1834.Ī year after they were married, Meucci and his wife emigrated to Cuba, largely because Meucci was fascinated by research being conducted in Havana into treating illnesses with electric shocks. He worked as a stage technician at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence, where he constructed a type of acoustic telephone to communicate between the stage and the theatre’s control room. He had to leave after two years because he needed to find work but continued to study part-time.Ī plaque marks the house in Florence's Via dei Serragli, A plaque marks the address in Via dei Serragli where he grew up.Īt the age of 15, Meucci gained a place at the Florence Academy of Fine Arts as its youngest student, studying chemical and mechanical engineering. Meucci’s story began when he was born in the San Frediano area of Florence, which was then part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, the first of nine children fathered by a policeman, Amatis Meucci, and his wife, Domenica. It has even been suggested that Bell actually stole Meucci’s invention and developed it as his own while the Italian died in poverty, having been unable to afford the patent. This was part of the evidence Fossella submitted to the House, which prompted a resolution in June, 2002, that the wealth and fame that Bell enjoyed were based on a falsehood. Yet Meucci’s invention was demonstrated in public 16 years before Bell took out a patent for his device. ![]() Until Vito Fossella, a Congressman from New York, asked the House of Representatives to recognise that the credit should have gone to Meucci, it was the Scottish-born scientist Alexander Graham Bell who was always seen as father of modern communications. Engineer from Florence was 'true' father of communicationsĪntonio Meucci, the Italian engineer who was acknowledged 113 years after his death to be the true inventor of the telephone, was born on this day in 1808 in Florence.
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