Antonio Meucci

Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci ( , ; 13 April 1808 – 18 October 1889) was an Italian inventor and an associate of Giuseppe Garibaldi, a major political figure in the history of Italy. Meucci is best known for developing a voice-communication apparatus that several sources credit as the first telephone.

Meucci set up a form of voice-communication link in his Staten Island, New York, home that connected the second-floor bedroom to his laboratory. The U.S. House of Representatives in a resolution in 2002 also acknowledged Meucci's work in the invention of the telephone, although the U.S. Senate did not join the resolution and the interpretation of the resolution is disputed.

Early life

thumb|Commemorative plaque on Meucci's house

Meucci was born at Via dei Serragli 44 in the San Frediano borough of Florence, First French Empire (now in the Italian Republic), on 13 April 1808, as the first of nine children to Amatis Meucci and Domenica Pepi.

In November 1821, at the age of 13, he was admitted to Florence Academy of Fine Arts as its youngest student, where he studied chemical and mechanical engineering.

Meucci later became employed at the Teatro della Pergola in Florence as a stage technician, assisting Artemio Canovetti.

In 1834 Meucci constructed a type of acoustic telephone to communicate between the stage and control room at the Teatro of Pergola. This telephone was constructed on the principles of pipe-telephones used on ships and still functions. He married costume designer Esterre Mochi, who was employed in the same theatre, on 7 August 1834.

In 1850, the third renewal of Meucci's contract with Don Francisco Martí y Torrens expired, and his friendship with General Giuseppe Garibaldi made him a suspect citizen in Cuba. On the other hand, the fame reached by Samuel F. B. Morse in the United States encouraged Meucci to make his living through inventions.

Staten Island, New York

On 13 April 1850, Meucci and his wife emigrated to the United States, taking with them approximately 26,000 pesos fuertes in savings (approximately $500,000 in 2010 dollars), and settled in the Clifton area of Staten Island, New York, New York. Between 1856 and 1870, Meucci developed more than 30 different kinds of telephones on the basis of this prototype.

A postage stamp was produced in Italy in 2003 that featured a portrait of Meucci. Around 1858, artist Nestore Corradi sketched Meucci's communication concept. His drawing was used to accompany the stamp in a commemorative publication of the Italian Postal and Telegraph Society. during the years 1859–1861, Meucci was in close business and social relations with William E. Ryder, who invested money in Meucci's inventions and paid the expenses of his experiments. Their close working friendship continued until 1867.

In August 1870 Meucci reportedly was able to capture a transmission of articulated human voice at the distance of a mile by using a copper plate as a conductor, insulated by cotton. He called this device the "telettrofono". While he was recovering from injuries that befell him in a boiler explosion aboard a Staten Island ferry, the Westfield, Meucci's financial and health state was so bad that his wife sold his drawings and devices to a second-hand dealer to raise money.

Patent caveat

On 12 December 1871 Meucci set up an agreement with Angelo Zilio Grandi (Secretary of the Italian Consulate in New York), Angelo Antonio Tremeschin (entrepreneur), Sereno G.P. Breguglia Tremeschin (businessman), in order to constitute the Telettrofono Company. The constitution was notarized by Angelo Bertolino, a Notary Public of New York. Although their society funded him with $20, only $15 was needed to file for a full patent application. The caveat his lawyer submitted to the US Patent Office on 28 December 1871 was numbered 3335 and titled "Sound Telegraph".

The following is the text of Meucci's caveat, omitting legal details of the Petition, Oath, and Jurat:

Analysis of Meucci's caveat

Meucci repeatedly focused on insulating the electrical conductor and even insulating the people communicating, but does not explain why this would be desirable. The mouth piece is like a "speaking trumpet" so that "the sound concentrated upon the wire" is communicated to the other person, but he does not say that the sound is converted to variable electrical conduction in the wire. "Another instrument is also applied to the ears", but he does not say that variable electrical conduction in the wire is to be converted to sound. which is consistent with acoustic sound vibrations in the wire that get transmitted better if electrical conductors such as a wire or metallic tube are used.

Meucci emphasizes that the conductors "for mouth and ears ... must be metallic", but does not explain why this would be desirable. He mentions "communication with the ground" but does not suggest that a ground return must complete a circuit if only "the wire" (singular, not plural) is used between the sender's mouth piece and the receiver's ear piece, with one or the other person being electrically insulated from the ground by means of glass insulators ("...consists in isolating two persons ... by placing them upon glass insulators; employing glass, for example, at the foot of the chair or bench on which each sits, and putting them in communication by means of a telegraph wire").

Robert V. Bruce, a biographer of Bell, asserted that Meucci's caveat could never have become a patent because it never described an electric telephone.

Other researchers have pointed to inconsistencies and inaccuracies in Bruce's account of the invention of the telephone, firstly with the name used by Meucci to describe his invention—Bruce refers to Meucci's device as a "telephone", not as the "telettrofono". Bruce's reporting of Meucci's purported relationship with Dr. Seth R. Beckwith has been deemed inaccurate. Beckwith, a former surgeon and general manager of the Overland Telephone Company of New York, "had acquired a substantial knowledge in the telephonic field and had become an admirer of Meucci". In 1885, he became general manager of the Globe Telephone Company, which had "started an action attempting to involve the government in hindering U.S. Bell's monopoly."

Not only did Beckwith's Globe Telephone Company base its claims against the Bell Telephone Company on Meucci's caveat, but the claims were also supported by approximately 30 affidavits, which stated that Meucci had repeatedly built and used different types of electric telephones several years before Bell did.

English historian William Aitken does not share Bruce's viewpoint. Bruce indirectly referred to Meucci as "the silliest and weakest impostor", while Aitken has gone so far as to define Meucci as the first creator of an electrical telephone.

Other recognition of Meucci's work in the past came from the International Telecommunication Union, positing that Meucci's work was one of the four precursors to Bell's telephone, as well as from the Smithsonian Institution, which listed Meucci as one of the eight most important inventors of the telephone in a 1976 exhibit.

Meucci and his business partners hired an attorney (J. D. Stetson), who filed a caveat on behalf of Meucci with the patent office. They had wanted to prepare a patent application, but the partners did not provide the $250 fee, so all that was prepared was a caveat, since the fee for that was only $20. However, the caveat did not contain a clear description of how the asserted invention would actually function. Meucci advocates claim the attorney erased margin notes Meucci had added to the document.

Telettrofono Company

thumb|upright|Meucci

In 1872, Meucci and his friend Angelo Bertolino went to Edward B. Grant, Vice President of American District Telegraph Co. of New York (not Western Union as sometimes stated), to ask for help. Meucci asked him for permission to test his apparatus on the company's telegraph lines. He gave Grant a description of his prototype and a copy of his caveat. After waiting two years, Meucci went to Grant and asked for his documents back, but Grant allegedly told him they had been lost.

After Bell secured his patents in 1876 and subsequent years, the Bell Telephone Company filed suit in court against the Globe Telephone Company (amongst many others) for patent infringement. Purportedly too poor to hire a legal team, Meucci was represented only by lawyer Joe Melli, an orphan whom Meucci treated as his own son. While American Bell Telephone Company v. Globe Telephone Company, Antonio Meucci, et al. was still proceeding, Bell also became involved with The U.S. Government v. American Bell Telephone Company, instigated by the Pan-Electric Telephone Company, which had secretly given Augustus Hill Garland the U.S. Attorney General 10% of its shares, employed him as a director, and then asked him to void Bell's patent. Had he succeeded in overturning Bell's patent, the U.S. Attorney General stood to become exceedingly rich by reason of his shares.

Trial

The Havana experiments were briefly mentioned in a letter by Meucci, published by Il Commercio di Genova of 1 December 1865 and by L'Eco d'Italia of 21 October 1865 (both existing today).

An important piece of evidence brought up in the trial was Meucci's Memorandum Book, which contained Meucci's noted drawings and records between 1862 and 1882. In the trial, Antonio Meucci was accused of having produced records after Bell's invention and that he backdated them. As proof, the prosecutor brought forward the fact that the Rider & Clark company was founded only in 1863. At trial, Meucci said William E. Rider himself, one of the owners, had given him a copy of the memorandum book in 1862; however, Meucci was not believed.

On 13 January 1887, the United States Government moved to annul the patent issued to Bell on the grounds of fraud and misrepresentation. After a series of decisions and reversals, the Bell company won a decision in the Supreme Court, though a couple of the original claims from the lower court cases were left undecided. By the time that the trial wound its way through nine years of legal battles, the U.S. prosecuting attorney had died and the two Bell patents (No. 174,465 dated 7 March 1876 and No. 186,787 dated 30 January 1877) were no longer in effect, although the presiding judges agreed to continue the proceedings due to the case's importance as a "precedent".

With a change in administration and charges of conflict of interest (on both sides) arising from the original trial, the U.S. Attorney General dropped the lawsuit on 30 November 1897 leaving several issues undecided on the merits. During a deposition filed for the 1887 trial, Meucci claimed to have created the first working model of a telephone in Italy in 1834. In 1886, in the first of three cases in which he was involved, Meucci took the stand as a witness in the hopes of establishing his invention's priority. Meucci's evidence in this case was disputed due to lack of material evidence of his inventions as his working models were reportedly lost at the laboratory of American District Telegraph (ADT) of New York. ADT did not merge with Western Union to become its subsidiary until 1901.

Meucci's patent caveat had described a lover's telegraph, which transmitted sound vibrations mechanically across a taut wire, a conclusion that was also noted in various reviews ("The court further held that the caveat of Meucci did not describe any elements of an electric speaking telephone...", and "The court held that Meucci's device consisted of a mechanical telephone consisting of a mouthpiece and an earpiece connected by a wire, and that beyond this the invention of Meucci was only imagination.") Meucci's work, like many other inventors of the period, was based on earlier acoustic principles and despite evidence of earlier experiments, the final case involving Meucci was eventually dropped upon his death.

Death

Meucci became ill in March 1889,

Invention of the telephone

thumb|Replica of the telettrofono at [[Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci of Milan, Italy, invented by Antonio Meucci and credited by several sources as the first telephone.]]

thumb|Monument dedicated to Meucci in [[Gravesend, Brooklyn, calling him "Father of the telephone"]]

There has been much dispute over who deserves recognition as the first inventor of the telephone, although Bell was credited with being the first to transmit articulate speech by undulatory currents of electricity. The Federazione Italiana di Elettrotecnica has devoted a museum to Meucci featuring a chronology of his inventing the telephone and tracing the history of the two trials opposing Meucci and Bell. They support the claim that Antonio Meucci was the real inventor of the telephone. However, some scholars outside Italy do not recognize the claims that Meucci's device had any bearing on the development of the telephone. Author Tom Farley writes that: "Nearly every scholar agrees that Bell and Watson were the first to transmit intelligible speech by electrical means. Others transmitted a sound or a click or a buzz but our boys [Bell and Watson] were the first to transmit speech one could understand."

Judge Wallace's ruling was bitterly regarded by historian Giovanni Schiavo as a miscarriage of justice.

2002 U.S. Congressional resolution

In 2002, on the initiative of U.S. Representative Vito Fossella (R-NY), in cooperation with an Italian-American deputation, the U.S. House of Representatives passed United States HRes. 269 on Antonio Meucci stating "that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged." According to the preamble, "if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell." The resolution's sponsor described it as "a message that rings loud and clear recognizing the true inventor of the telephone, Antonio Meucci."

In 2002, some news articles reported that "the resolution said his 'telettrofono', demonstrated in New York in 1860, made him the inventor of the telephone in the place of Bell, who took out a patent 16 years later."

A similar resolution was introduced to the U.S. Senate but no vote was held on the resolution.

Despite the House of Representatives resolution, its interpretation as supporting Meucci's claim as the inventor of the telephone remains disputed, as the resolution only referred to "his work in the invention of" the telephone rather than a direct assertion that he was the inventor of the telephone.

The House of Commons of Canada responded ten days later by unanimously passing a parliamentary motion stating that Alexander Graham Bell was the inventor of the telephone.

The Italian newspaper La Repubblica hailed the vote to recognize Meucci as a belated comeuppance for Bell.

Other inventions

This list is also taken from Basilio Catania's historical reconstruction.

1825 Chemical compound to be used as an improved propellant in fireworks
1834 In Florence's Teatro della Pergola, he sets up a "pipe telephone" to communicate from the stage to the maneuver trellis-work, at about eighteen meters height.
1840 Improved filters and chemical processing of waters supplying the city of Havana, Cuba.
1844 First electroplating factory of the Americas, set up in Havana, Cuba. Previously, objects to be electroplated were sent to Paris.
1846 Improved apparatus for electrotherapy, featuring a pulsed current breaker with rotating cross.
1847 Restructuring of the Tacón Theater in Havana, following a hurricane. Meucci conceived a new structure of the roof and ventilation system, to avoid the roof to be taken off in like situations.
1848 Astronomical observations by means of a marine telescope worth $280.
1849 Chemical process for the preservation of corpses, to cope with the high demand for bodies of immigrants to be sent to Europe, avoiding decomposition during the many weeks navigation.
1849 First invention of electrical transmission of speech.
1850-1851 First stearic candle factory of the Americas, set up in Clifton, New York.
1855 Realization of celestas, with crystal bars instead of steel, and pianos (one is on display at the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum, in Rosebank, New York)
1856 First lager beer factory of Staten Island, the Clifton Brewery, in Clifton, New York
1858–1860 Invention of paraffin candle, on a candle mold for the same and on a rotating blade device for finishing the same.
1860 First paraffin candle factory in the world, the New York Paraffine Candle Co., set up in Clifton, New York, early in 1860, then moved to Stapleton, New York. It produced over 1,000 candles per day.
1860 Experiments on the use of dry batteries in electrical traction and other industrial applications.
1860 Process to turn red corals into a pink color (more valued), as requested by Enrico Bendelari, a merchant of New York.
1862 on a kerosene lamp that generates a very bright flame, without smoke, (therefore not needing a glass tube), thanks to electricity developed by two thin platinum plates embracing the flame.
1862–1863 Process for treating and bleaching oil or kerosene to obtain 185 oils for paint, and . "Antonio Meucci Patent Oil" was sold by Rider & Clark Co., 51 Broad Street, New York, and exported to Europe.
1864 Invention of new, more destructive ammunition for guns and cannons, proposed to the US army and to General Giuseppe Garibaldi.
1864–1865 Processes to obtain paper pulp from wood or other vegetable substances, , and . Associated Press was interested in producing paper with this process, which was also the first to introduce the recovery of the leaching liquor.
1865 Process for making wicks out of vegetable fiber, .
1867 A paper factory, the "Perth Amboy Fiber Co.," was set up, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The paper pulp was obtained from either marsh grass or wood. It was the first to recycle waste paper.
1871 for "Effervescent Drinks," fruit-vitamin rich drinks that Meucci found useful during his recovery from the wounds and burns caused by the explosion of the Westfield ferry.
1871 Filed a patent caveat, (not a 'patent') for a telephone device in December with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
1873 for "Sauce for Food." According to Roberto Merloni, general manager of the Italian STAR company, this patent anticipates modern food technologies.
1873 Conception of a screw steamer suitable for navigation in canals
1874 Process for refining crude oil (caveat)
1875 Filter for tea or coffee, similar to those used in present-day coffee machines
1875 Household utensil (description not available) usefulness to cheapness, that will find a ready sale
1875 "Lactometer," for chemically detecting adulterations of milk. It anticipates by fifteen years the well-known Babcock test.
1875 Upon request by Giuseppe Tagliabue (a physical instruments maker of Brooklyn, New York), Meucci devises and manufactures several aneroid barometers of various shapes.
1875 Meucci decided not to renew his telephone caveat, thus enabling Bell to get a patent.
1876 "Hygrometer," which was a marked improvement over the popular hair-hygrometer of the time. He set up a small factory in Staten Island for fabrication of the same.
1878 Method for preventing noise on elevated railways, a problem much felt at the time in New York.
1878 Process for fabricating ornamental paraffin candles for Christmas trees.
1880 US patent application "Wire for Electrical Purposes"
1881 Process for making postage and revenue stamps.
1883 for "Plastic Paste," as hard and tenacious to be suitable for billiard balls.

Patents

US patent images in TIFF format

1859 – Candle mold
1860 – Candle mold
1862 – Lamp burner
1862 – Improvement in treating kerosene
1863 – Improvement in preparing hydrocarbon liquid
1864 – Improved process for removing mineral, gummy, and resinous substances from vegetables
1865 – Improved method of making wicks
1865 – Improved process for removing mineral, gummy, and resinous substances from vegetables
1866 – Improved process for making paper-pulp from wood
1872 – Improved method of manufacturing effervescent drinks from fruits
1873 – Improvement in sauces for food
1875 – Method of testing milk
1876 – Hygrometer
1883 – Plastic paste for billiard balls and vases

References

External links

US Congress Resolution 269

Bill Number H.RES.269 for the 107th Congress
Summary and status of Resolution 269

Museums and celebrations

The Garibaldi-Meucci Museum
The Garibaldi-Meucci Museum (Staten Island site)
Italian National Committee for the Meucci bicentennial, 1808–2008 (archived)
Antonio Meucci – L'invenzione del telefono in La storia siamo noi Italian TV program on Italy's national public broadcasting company RAI
Antonio Meucci Centre at COPRAS (Italian-Canadian heritage website)
Dr. Basilio Catania Website (website of a telecommunications researcher and historian with an extensive collection of Meucci documentation, including The Proofs of Meucci's Priority)
Antonio Meucci on BobsOldPhones (by Bob Estreich, an Australian telephone researcher and historian)
Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress, 1862–1939
Alexander Graham Bell Institute at Cape Breton University