The First Phone Call Was 133 Years Ago

magacious writes "March 10 is the 133rd anniversary of the first telephone call. It occurred between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant Thomas Watson back on this day in 1876. But there is some debate about whether Bell is actually the rightful owner of the crown for such invention. Having worked on the idea of transmitting speech using electricity for some time, Bell filed his patent on 14 February 1876, either just before or just after his main rival for the title of inventor of the telephone, Elisha Gray, filed his own. Bell won the patent and Gray died in obscurity."

Comments

Re:Antonio Meucci

[iocat]

Bingo! I wish I had mod points. When you look at a lot of major inventions -- the telephone, the car, the lightbulb, TV, digital general purpose computers, etc. -- you'll find that regardless of whoever eventually was credited with the invention, there were any number of people working on the same problem, at about the same rate, and making very close breakthroughs, at the same time. Sometimes ideas are just "in the air." Typically one guy gets credit, which is sort of sad, but that's kind of the way it is -- at least with lay people. Anyone who is a historian or reads a little more deeply will evetually learn all the other peopel and their possibly claims / contributions. Because there are so many people who were clearly on the right track, you will also get a lot of arguments.

for instance, if you look here , you'll see three groups, each of which has a strong case for being said to be the inevntor of the modern computer (Konrad Zuse, who built a programmable electro-mechanical computer in 1936, Anastoff and Berry who build a digital computer -- that was not general purpose or programmable in 1942, and Eckert and Mauchley, who built a vacuum tube base, programmable, general purpose computer in 1946). I won't get into the details, but it becomes a religious thing at some point -- I once fell out with a friend because I refused to accept Anastoff as the sole inventor of the computer. (My friend was from Iowa).