Telephone: a Stolen invention appeared at 1849 in Cuba, by Antonio Meucci

The Peace of God to all that belong to the Light
Dear Readers,

We are approaching gradually in about two years to the 170 years of an invention that changed for ever the life of humanity, the electmagnetic telephone.

I am sure some of you may have thought that this is a wrong statement, we have been taught that the telephone was invented in about 1877 in the USA by the Scottish American Alexander Graham Bell, but that is not the case.

The first prototype of electromagnetic device to transmit the human voice was tested by the Italian inventor Antonio Meucci, born in Florence on April 13th 1808.

It was in 1849, while Meucci was in La Havana Cuba, he went to that country for a contract hired by the Teatro Tacon.

He improved the design that was originated in a experiments on a cure using electricity inspired in the treatments of Mesmer in Europe, working exhaustively on it until 1858 to try to make it commercial, but he only applied for a patent in 1872, having trouble to pay its cost, so it remain in that office as caveat for years.

Meucci didn't receive the patent he fairly deserved for lack of constant funding to sponsor the legal cost to proceed it, so it was just accepted as a caveat in 1873..

The original place of the Invention was not United States, but the Island of Cuba, where Meucci worked before to come to America.

Since Meucci wrote in his patent electromechanical device to describe his invention, and by a decision of a judge, not of Engineers or the Patent office, since the term electromagnetic was not on it, the disputed patent was credited to Bell who certainly did so in his application of 1877.

Meucci had invented an acoustic telephone while he worked for the theater dela Pergolla in Florence, Italy long before in 1834 to be used as an intercom in buildings or houses and it is still in use in old boats.

Please check:
Antonio Meucci - The true inventor of the Telephone

When Meucci invented the first telephone Alexander Graham Bell was just two years old, and was not even arrived to America from Scotland.

Please check:
Antonio Meucci, Italian American that originally invented the telephone

Unfortunately this Italian political refugee that came to live in the State of New York was not really as focused in business as it was Bell, his motivations and methods were more scientific, also more focused in the study of the effects of mild electrical currents in the human body.

His telephone was discovered by him by accident from observations he made from trying to invent a cure to migraine using electrodes to make circulate mild currents in patients of this ailment by 1848.

Please check:
Antonio Meucci Inventor of first prototype of Telephone

The thread is opened to discuss how fair or biassed is the criteria to credit inventions to the people that really developed them.

Even there is another inventor that also developed completely independently his own prototype of telephone Johanne Phillipe Reis in 1861, he was an autodidact scientist whose only academic degree was to be Language teacher.

Pls check:
Johann Phillippe Reis Notable German Inventor

He was born in Gelnhausen, Germany, the son of a bakery master. He presented his invention to the office of patents in Frankfurt, Germany, it was however underestimated in its economic potential and relegated to be a physics curiousity. Johann Reis died in 1874 of Tuberculosis even before Bell was credited with the invention.

Please check:
Johann Phillipe Reis Telephone invented in 1861 in Germany

It was only near the death of Meucci, less than two years before it, that on 13th of January 1887, the United States Government moved to annul the patent issued to Bell on the grounds of fraud and misrepresentation. Meucci never lived enough to be able to defend his rights on the invention though but at his so advanced age he tried, nevertheless the court failed only after his death.

Thanks for your attention,

The Angel of Lightness

a reply to: The angel of light

The entire "patent process" and "intellectual property" laws need to be overhauled. God knows how many technical developments cannot be brought to market because someone submitted a similar patent and refuses to develop it. Also, large companies buy and sit on patents to make sure a new or improved product or improvement doesn't interfere with their current business model thus stifling innovation and advancement.

a reply to: The angel of light

Not yet resigned to his bad luck, Meucci took his notebooks with all his experiments and a new prototype of telephone to Western Union telegraph company, but their executives (friends and colleagues of Bell) failed to meet him and later claimed to have lost the items he had given them. Two years later Bell filed a patent and set up a company with Western Union.

South China Morning Post
The idea is that Bell stole the invention.
Meucci was recognized by Congress as the rrue inventor of the telephone years later.

a reply to: butcherguy


1,200-year-old telephone, amazing invention of the ancient Chimu civilization

www.ancient-origins.net...



www.messagetoeagle.com...

originally posted by: infolurker
a reply to: The angel of light

The entire "patent process" and "intellectual property" laws need to be overhauled. God knows how many technical developments cannot be brought to market because someone submitted a similar patent and refuses to develop it. Also, large companies buy and sit on patents to make sure a new or improved product or improvement doesn't interfere with their current business model thus stifling innovation and advancement.

I remember quite a few in the field of computer graphics. One was the XOR patent by Quantel. If you have a computer screen that uses pixels, then one way of highlighting something like a rectangle was to use XOR . This worked with 256-color framebuffers as well as true-color pixels. But they patented doing this in hardware. It was very simple. Any binary number simply has the bits negated: 00110011 becomes 11001100. But as they were the first, they win the patent, even though it was obvious.

Another patent involved floating-point framebuffers. Instead of using integers, the framebuffer would store RGBA as the official IEEE-749 floating point format. Once again, because these types of calculations were extremely expensive at the time (1990's), it was patented. Later those patents were sold off to a patent consortiums who does nothing but sit there and spend their days looking for violations of their portfolio.

The workaround was to create a new pixel format of the same size (32-bits), swizzled around a bit, but redefined the specification as a "data format that can be converted into a 32-bit floating point value". Since the bits weren't stored in floating point format at the hardware level, but were converted back when read from memory, this bypassed the patent of "storing texture data in IEEE-749 floating-point format".

There are also patent battles where a small company may patent their technology, but the multinationals will create a patent minefield around them. That happened to Dyson vs Hoover.

a reply to: infolurker

Hi Dear infolurker,

I like a lot the materials about the preColumbian artifact that can be defined as an acoustic telephone using cords from the Chimu civilization, it is pretty interesting.

Europe needed to wait until 1667 to have this same kind of string telephone, and the invention is credited to the English Physicist Robert Hooke.

Please check
historyoftelephony.wordpress.com...

I have since years a go the impression or suspicion that there are in the Andean area of South America cultures that we believe didn't have writing system but perhaps they used a kind of glyphs instead of alphabet.

Notice that the walls of Chanchan are full of representations of animals carved on clay. Glyphs carved in clay or stone can be preserved along centuries, but what about the ones that may have used on other materials that last less time, like wood?

Thanks for those interesting articles.

The Angel of Lightness

a reply to: The angel of light

You may like this as well. The legend of Naymlap who came by boat with technology and Chumael Ah Canule

what-when-how.com...

www.ancient-origins.net...