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

Antonio Meucci

[Shin-LaC]

was using his electromagnetic telephone to talk to his wife from his basement lab to their second-floor bedroom in 1856.

Re:Antonio Meucci

[Kirys]

Meucci was the real owner of the idea of the phone. But he was almost forgotten, only recently it received some credits.

Re:Antonio Meucci

[Anonymous Coward]

"In 2002 the U. S. House of Representatives passed a bill recognizing Meucci's accomplishment and stating that "if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell."

From
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meucci

Re:Antonio Meucci

[Anonymous Coward]

H. Res. 269
In the House of Representatives, U.S.,
June 11, 2002.
Whereas Antonio Meucci, the great Italian inventor, had a career that was both extraordinary and tragic;
Whereas, upon immigrating to New York, Meucci continued to work with ceaseless vigor on a project he had begun in Havana, Cuba, an invention he later called the `teletrofono', involving electronic communications;
Whereas Meucci set up a rudimentary communications link in his Staten Island home that connected the basement with the first floor, and later, when his wife began to suffer from crippling arthritis, he created a permanent link between his lab and his wife's second floor bedroom;
Whereas, having exhausted most of his life's savings in pursuing his work, Meucci was unable to commercialize his invention, though he demonstrated his invention in 1860 and had a description of it published in New York's Italian language newspaper;
Whereas Meucci never learned English well enough to navigate the complex American business community;
Whereas Meucci was unable to raise sufficient funds to pay his way through the patent application process, and thus had to settle for a caveat, a one year renewable notice of an impending patent, which was first filed on December 28, 1871;
Whereas Meucci later learned that the Western Union affiliate laboratory reportedly lost his working models, and Meucci, who at this point was living on public assistance, was unable to renew the caveat after 1874;
Whereas in March 1876, Alexander Graham Bell, who conducted experiments in the same laboratory where Meucci's materials had been stored, was granted a patent and was thereafter credited with inventing the telephone;
Whereas on January 13, 1887, the Government of the United States moved to annul the patent issued to Bell on the grounds of fraud and misrepresentation, a case that the Supreme Court found viable and remanded for trial;
Whereas Meucci died in October 1889, the Bell patent expired in January 1893, and the case was discontinued as moot without ever reaching the underlying issue of the true inventor of the telephone entitled to the patent; and
Whereas if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell:
Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.
Attest:
Clerk.

Re:Antonio Meucci

[hey!]

I think the audio telephone was one of those ideas whose time had come. It's not as if it sprung from the head of some individual genius, a lot of people were working in that direction; take any one of them out of the picture and the result wouldn't be much different.

Ironically, the telephone was more or less an inevitable outgrowth of work on improving the capacity of long distance cables to carry telegraphs -- a digital medium. In a sense, we've come full circle.

One of the ideas that people were working on is what we'd call frequency division multiplexing: sending multiple simultaneous telegraph signals on the same wire but encoded on carriers of different frequencies. Once you started to work in that direction an audio telephone would be simple, relatively speaking. So somebody would have "invented" it, because plenty of people were working along those lines.

The lone genius inventor is a mythical idea, one that distorts our thinking about stuff like intellectual property. There are genius inventors, to be sure, but surely there were men like Thomas Edison or Nicola Tesla that lived in the dark ages. The reason we've never heard of them is that even a genius needs other people's ideas to build upon.

Re:Such advances!

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

More like "can you hear me? CAN YOU HEAR ME? HELLO?? *beep*beep*beep* Ah f**ing Verizon!"

and the second call

[petes_PoV]

started "can I speak to Mr Alexander Bell" .... Hello Mr. Bell, how are you today. I wonder if you would take a few minutes to answer some questions ... hangs up in disgust

Re:Patent sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

> So while it is good that Bell benefited from this invention it is bad that other inventors did not.

There was no need for him to profit, given the large amount of people inventing the concept, the idea was not non-obvious, and as such would have become public knowledge in the short term anyway.
Thus the patent, particularly since it was wrong anyway, only served to add cost and hinder innovation. It was of advantage only for Mr. Bell and of a disadvantage to all of society, or in other words the exact opposite of what patents were supposed to be.

Re:133

[AliasMarlowe]

is such an important number that it's worth a news story by its own

But of course! It's a happy octagonal Harshad integer, and a Blum semiprime. We should read news stories about it every day!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/133_(number)