Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci was born in San Frediano, low-class area of the city of Florence, on April 13, 1808, while the city is under Napoleon rule. His family is poor and, even if he is admitted to the Art School [Accademia di Belle Arti], he cannot end his studies as he needs to start working very young. He changes many jobs, from custom employee propman for the “Pergola” theater in Florence. Here he builds an acoustic telephone: that is a telephone in which sound is conducted inside tubes. In the “Pergola” he meets Ester Mochi, a costumer, which he will marry.
Antonio Meucci gets interested in animal and physiological electricity while he was young. He is active in politics too, and he gets into the revolutionary movements aimed at the Unification of Italy which took place in 1831. Being him a liberal and a repubblican he is be arrested and remains three months in jail, sharing the cell with Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi. He is then pushed to leave the Great Duchy of Tuscany and will finally sail to Cuba. He settles in Havana as propman for the Tacòn Theatre. While in Cuba, while he was trying to cure rheumatisms of a patient via elettotherapy he manages to hear more clearly than he expected the cry of his patient, from the neighbouring room, as the current arrives to him. Meucci’s words were “I thought I heard this sound more distinctly than natural. I then put this copper of my instrument to my ear, and heard the sound of his voice through the wire. This was my first impression, and the origin of my idea of the transmission of the human voice by electricity”. He continues his experiment untill, in 1850, he settles inj the United States, and in the city of New York.
In New Yorh Meucci establishes a candle factory. Here he mets Giuseppe Garibaldi, which will work with Meucci; the two shares a long lasting important friendship. The collaboration between these two famous italians is proved in the New York museum “Garibaldi – Meucci”.
In 1854, Meucci’s wife Ester gets a crippling rheumatical arthritis which will oblige her to bed for the rest of her life, which will occur in 1884. Meucci realizes then the first true telephone link connecting his lab, nearby his cottage, with his wife’s bedroom. In a note dated 1857 Meucci describes his telephone: “it consists in a vibrating diaphragm and in a magnet electrified by a wire wounded around it. When the diaphragm vibrates the magnet modifies the wire curren. These modifications, once they reach the other end of the wire, impresses similar vibrations to the receiving diaphragm, which reproduces the words.”
Meucci ideas are clear, but he lacks the economic means to sustain his research. The candle factory goes bankrupt and Meucci seeks funding with rich italians but without luck. Soon he lacks also mony for his own living and he will survive thanks to his friends’ help.
(Western Electric Model 1317)
Meucci holds on and, in 1871 establishes e company and files in for a paptent, he names his invention “telettrofono”. The “Telettrophone Company,” has, as main scope, as the contract states, that of “carrying on all the necessary experiments to realize the ‘Telettrofono,’ that is the transmission of words (human voice) along electrical wires, as invented by Antonio Meucci”. There is still a money problem: with his $20 Meucci cannot afford to pay the cost of a patent, which sums up to $250 for a complete patent. As an alternative he files in for a “temporary” patent, or caveat, which lasts one year and can be renewed, the cost for each year being $10 dollari. Meucci will be able to pay this sum only up to year 1873.
In this same period, carrying with him much documentation on his researches, Meucci resorts to the powerfull American District Telegraph Company in New York, asking permission to use their lines for his experiments. The Company does not foresee the implication of the project and dismisses Meucci, causing him yet another failure.
In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell files in for a patent for his telephone. The following years will be spent by Meucci in an endless trial to obtain recognition of the paternity of the invention. Meucci is sponsored by the Globe Company, which suits Bell Company.
The lawsuit ends on July 19, 1887 with a decision which, even if it recognizes som merits to Antonio Meucci, is positive for Bell. “Nothing shows – says the decision – that Meucci really obtained any practical results, besides that of conducting, mechanically, the word along a cable. He surely used a mechanical conductor and he supposed that, by electrifying the conductor, he could have obtained better results”. In a nutshell the sentence states that Meucci had invented the telephone, but not the electrical one.
Antonio Meucci dies, aged 81, on Octover 18, 1889, shortly before that the Globe Company appeals against the sentence. After long lawsuits the Supreme Court of the United States will archive the case.
For more than a century, except in Italy, Bell has been considered the inventor of the telephone. On June 11, 2002, the Congress of the United States finally recognized officially that Antonio Meucci is the original inventor of the electrical telephone.
http://meucci.ing.unifi.it/
