The story of the telephone’s invention in 1876 is one of hard work, determination, and triumph. Many accounts make it sound like a fairy tale. After all, it has a terrific happy ending in which the hero, Alexander Graham Bell, uses his astonishing new device to transmit the words “Mr. Watson, come here. I want to see you.” However, the true story of how the telephone came to be is not quite as happy as most imagine. In fact, it is not a tale of triumph at all, but one of tragedy. What’s more, the first words ever spoken over a wire could not possibly have been uttered by Alexander Graham Bell, because he was only two years old at the time.
The year was 1849, and Antonio Meucci, a man trained in engineering, was experimenting with electricity. He and a doctor were trying to determine if electric shock could be used to cure illnesses. One day, when he turned on the switches to treat a patient in another room, he heard the patient yelp. However, the voice had not come from the next room—it had come from the copper wire that ran between them!
Following that fateful day, Meucci left his medical experiments behind. Instead, he set a goal to develop that talking wire into a machine he called a “talking telegraph.” After six years of trials and tests, he was able to build a working model. Meucci found it to be a useful device almost immediately.
Meucci’s wife had developed severe arthritis and was confined to her bed much of the time. So in 1855, Meucci used his model to set up a home telephone system. Through it, he was able to talk with his wife from his basement lab while she was resting in their second-floor bedroom.
Meucci was excited about his new device and desperately wanted to patent it, but he did not have the money to do so. At that time, it cost $250 to apply for a full patent. That’s equal to about $7,000 today. Meucci also wanted to build a telephone factory so that he could fill the world with his useful device. However, he did not have the funds to do that either. Meucci knew that investors could help him reach these goals, so in 1860 he held a demonstration of his wonderful new talking telegraph. Perhaps it was too new and strange. Perhaps people could not imagine how useful the device could be. Whatever the reason, no one invested in Meucci’s dream that day.
Meucci would not allow himself to become discouraged, however. Instead, he returned to his lab determined to make his talking machine even better. He worked for many more years and did just that. Unfortunately, he suffered another setback when he was injured in a ferry explosion. While he was in the hospital recovering, his wife had to sell his telephone models to pay the bills. When he was finally healed and home, he returned to his lab and started over. In all, Meucci developed more than thirty different kinds of telephones between 1856 and 1870.
In 1871, Meucci still lacked investors and was unable to pay the $250 patent fee, so he filed a patent caveat instead. A patent caveat cost only $10 and would not allow anyone else to patent the same idea for one full year. He renewed the patent caveat in 1872 and 1873, but sadly could no longer afford the $10 fee after that.
At about the same time that Antonio Meucci was filing patent caveats for his talking telegraph, Alexander Graham Bell was starting to work on his own telephone model. Bell was an expert in the field of elocution, or vocal speech. He was very skilled at teaching deaf students the challenging task of speaking aloud. Just like Meucci, he enjoyed experimenting. Bell also dreamed of a world full of useful telephones, just as Meucci did. However, he had something that Meucci did not. Bell had a wealthy father-in-law who was happy to invest in his dream.
On February 14, 1876, twenty-one years after Antonio Meucci’s first working model, Alexander Graham Bell paid the $250 fee and filed a full patent for the telephone. The rest, as they say, is history. Or is it?
On June 11, 2002, one hundred and twenty-six years after Bell’s patent was issued, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution recognizing Antonio Meucci as the true inventor of the telephone. Perhaps this telephone tale has a happy ending after all.
