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 | | | | | Ring of Truth? | | | In this corner, Alexander Graham Bell. And in this corner, Antonio Meucci. Our columnist looks at the fracas over who created the phone | |
| | | Nov. 18 — Pop quiz: Who invented the telephone? No, it’s not a trick question. As every schoolkid (or, at least, every schoolkid who copies stuff out of the encyclopedia) knows, the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell. | |
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SO WHY DOES the United States Congress think otherwise?
Over the summer, while the rest of us were debating Iraq, Homeland Security and James Traficant’s hair, Congress passed a resolution saying that thanks to “fraud and misrepresentation” on his part, Bell was “credited with inventing the telephone.”
So who, according to the United States Congress, did invent the telephone? Why, Antonio Meucci, of course.
According to the resolution—which passed by overwhelming voice vote on June 12, 2002—Meucci “demonstrated his invention in 1860” but 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.” Meucci, you see, “never learned English” and was thus unable to “navigate the complex American business community.”
And when further poverty ensued, the Italian-born inventor couldn’t even renew the caveat. “If Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee,” the resolution concludes, “no patent could have been issued to Bell.”
And you thought our Congress only made history. Turns out, they re-write it, too.
To accept Meucci’s claim, you have to be part conspiracy theorist, part mad scientist, part Italian-American activist.
First, the conspiracy theory. According to the Meuccists, the impoverished, naive, humble inventor was a victim of his own inability to swim with the sharks in the business world of the 1870s. An émigré to New York in 1850, Meucci quickly settled in Staten Island and experimented with making telegraph wires capable of carrying voice transmissions. He also set up a candle-making factory, a paper mill and a brewery to provide him with some cash flow. By some accounts, the money-losing candle factory was his most promising business venture.
But an article in New York’s Italian-language paper, Eco D’Italia, reported that Meucci’s telephone experiments actually succeeded. Sometime in 1860, the newspaper wrote that Meucci had “invented the way to transmit the human word by means of the electricity.” Meucci’s telephone was described as “a spool of metallic wire, within the center a bar of tempered steel, strongly magnetized, and a diaphragm above [which] transmits the human word exact, as it is spoken by the two persons that are in communication.”
Or maybe not. See, no one’s ever gotten a hold of the above quotation. In fact, it was rendered by Meucci from memory more than two decades later when Bell sued him for patent infringement. Of course Meucci had to recreate the article from memory: Every copy of that issue of Eco D’Italia had mysteriously disappeared just after Bell filed his suit. (Cue the mysterious horror movie music.)
To some Meuccists, that’s evidence enough that an anti-Meucci conspiracy was rampant even then. “If this [issue of the] paper would have been retrieved, the Bell patents would have become automatically void,” says Basilio Catania, an Italian telephone engineer who has devoted his life to promoting Meucci’s invention of the phone.
Catania also claims that Meucci’s notebook contains all the evidence anyone should need. In it, Meucci scribbled all sorts of schematics for working telephone systems—even though the only one he ever actually built was a simple wire hookup between his laboratory in the basement to his wife’s bedroom on the second floor (she was bed-bound and apparently needed a way to say, “Antonio, come here, I want you” without having to yell down three floors).
That notebook, however, was not admitted as evidence in Bell’s suit against Meucci. In that case, the judge ruled that Meucci “fail[ed] to show that he had reached any practical result beyond that of conveying speech mechanically by means of a wire telephone.” Meucci supporters retort that the judge was biased against a destitute, paranoid, non-English speaking candle-maker from Staten Island.
Meucci supporters also like to point out that the U.S. government later sued Bell for fraud—and the infallible U.S. government would only sue if it had a reason, right?
Well...it turned out that Attorney General Augustus Garland, who initiated the case against Bell, held millions of dollars in stock in one of Bell’s competitors. This wasn’t about defending the integrity of the patent process; this was a conflict of interest that makes the Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore two years ago look like an eighth-grade moot court.
Not that any of that mattered to the 107th Congress, which didn’t even call its celebrated library—which actually has the world’s foremost collection of Bell material—for a consult before passing the resolution.
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Worried that the U.S. Congress was whitewashing history, I headed out to Meucci’s home—now a museum—in Staten Island for one of my famous fact-finding/pizza-eating missions. Call me crazy, but I was expecting to find Meucci’s original phone still in place, some remnants of his telephonic research or at least a few bottles of beer from his brewery, but all I found were a lot of portraits of a guy with thick mutton-chop sideburns that were captioned, “Antonio Meucci: The inventor of the telephone.”
It wasn’t exactly convincing stuff, so I called Vito Fossella, the Staten Island Congressman who pushed through the House resolution. Fossella wasn’t exactly convincing, either. “I just thought, ‘Hey, this guy was an immigrant who made a great contribution to America,’” Fossella said. “He was the true inventor of the telephone.”
Since his resolution passed, the Congressman has been inundated with hate mail and angry calls from Bell loyalists, especially those in Brantford, Ontario, where Bell conducted some early research.
“What can I say? They love me in Italy, but they hate me in Canada,” said Fossella. “I had no idea it would be so controversial.”
The controversy is only beginning. Italian-American groups now say they will pressure textbook publishers to re-write the passages on Bell to ensure that Meucci gets credit for the phone. After all, Meucci invented the telephone—Congress has said so!
But then there’s Edwin Grosvenor, who’s waging a one-man crusade to make sure that the history books aren’t re-written. Grosvenor wrote a book called “Alexander Graham Bell: The Life and Times of the Inventor of the Telephone,” so I had a vague sense of where he stood on the issue. But I called him anyway. I found him, predictably, livid.
It’s bad enough that Congress is dissing Bell, but Grosvenor’s biggest complaint with the Meuccists is that they play fast and loose with the truth. The best example, Grosvenor said, is a long-debunked story that Bell stole Meucci’s designs from a Western Union laboratory. Yes, Meucci gave models of his “telephone” to the Western Union company in 1872 in hopes of getting the company to finance his research. And yes, Bell later gained possession of those very laboratories in a patent-infringement settlement with Western Union. Unfortunately, the Meuccists ignore the fact that the settlement came years after Bell had already invented the phone.
“They repeated that story so many times that they think it’s true,” Grosvenor said. “And now Congress has affirmed it. Without even investigating! If Vito Fossella puts forth a resolution saying that the Earth is flat, does that make it flat?”
No, of course not. Besides, I always thought that Tom DeLay was working on the flat-earth resolution.
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post who is constantly underwhelmed by modern phone service. His Web site is at www.gersh.tv
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
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