TELEPHONE INVENTED IN CUBA !!!!!!!

[mellisas]

well l never

An Italian invented the telephone in Cuba

By Hector Arturo

Cubanow.- Was not Alexander Graham Bell, he only appropriated of something that was not his idea, since that, extremely useful machine, to get closer people despite the distances, the telephone, was invented in Havana by the Italian Antonio Meucci.


Carlos Juan Finlay, the prominent Cuban physician and scientist, was not the only case of someone stripped of the recognition for his discovery by the US legal authorities.

The US authorities, during a long time, tried to deny that Finlay was the true discoverer of the Aedes Aegypti as the transmission agent of the yellow fever, despite, in order to demonstrate his theories, he put his own life, as well as the ones of his closest, in danger. A US military doctor, was presented during several years with that merit, until the truth went into open and the Cuban scientist started to occupy his place in the History of the Sciences, recognized by the mankind.

Meucci wrongly dialed….

With the telephone, happened something similar, since the Italian Antonio Meuci, was the only and true inventor of that, so necessary machine. He even made the discovery of how to transmit the human voice using the electric current in Havana.

Born in the Italian city of Florence in 1808, Meucci worked as a customs officer, while doing his studies of Mechanical Engineering and matriculated in the Arts Academy.

Hired as a stagehand at the La Pergola theatre in Rome, he created a system that allowed the workers to communicate between them at certain distances, as well as other devises that facilitated the work at the stages.


Meucci moved to the Cuban capital along with his wife in the decade of 1830 to work at Teatro Tacón located in Prado and San Rafael Streets, same place where now is the Gran Teatro de la Habana, main location of the National Ballet of Cuba, now directed by the first dancer Alicia Alonso.

Here he continued with is passion for the experiments and one day while treating a friend’s illness through electric shocks he realized that he was hearing the voice of his friend from the other room through the copper cables that linked both rooms.

During the next decade Meucci dedicated himself to improve the invention with which he traveled from Havana to New York seeking market opportunities.

While living in the Cuban capital, the degenerative osteoarthritis suffered by his wife forced Meucci to create a fixed connection between his laboratory located in the house basement and their bedroom on the second floor.

In 1855 Meucci improved his prototype with a soapbox and a metallic diaphragm, allowing him to extend his devices to other rooms. This new prototype also allowed him to extend the connectivity between Teatro Tacón stage and the workshop where he worked, that was in an adjacent building.

Five years later Meucci sent his invention to Italy, but no businessman was interested in either financing or manufacturing it. In poverty, Meucci many times considered selling the rights of his invention.

Meucci presented his project to a New Yorker daily newspaper in Italian tongue that supported him in making public exhibits to attract investors who were able to clearly, listen the voice of an Italian singer through the device.

In 1871 Meucci was confined in bed at a hospital for some time, due to serious burns that he suffered at the explosion in the Westfield vessel where he was traveling to New York.

During that period of time his wife decided to sell all of Meucci’s belongings, including the telephone, for six dollars. When the Italian genius tried to get them back, the buyer of used items told him that an “unknown young man” had purchased them.

The tireless Meucci dedicated himself to rebuild and perfect his invention, before someone else patented it and at the end of 1871, with 20 dollars collected among his friends, he presented the invention in New York Patent Office where he deposited a preliminary inscription of the “teletrophone” which had to be renewed yearly.

He renewed the inscription in 1872 and 1873 however next year in 1874 he was not able to obtain 250 dollars which was the fee for the annoying steps.


Busy number….

In 1872 Antonio Meucci made the mistake of trusting Western Union Telegraph Co. honesty. He showed its officers his “talking phone” with all the specifications. He then started to receive pretexts from those officers until finally two years later they told him that they have lost the samples and papers.

In 1876 American Alexander Graham Bell presented the patent for the telephone as being his invention. Coincidentally, Bell worked for Western Union, whose executives had an excellent relationship with the bureaucrats of New York Patent Office.

The executives bluntly explained Meucci that the papers of his provisional patent were lost and the Italian decided to take the situation to the court.

The fixed trials of Meucci against Bell started. In 1886 the District Attorney showed enough proofs in Meucci’s favor and even the famous Thomas Alba Edison wrote a letter to the judge defending the Italian inventor. But the jury’s verdict was against Meucci, because of the substantial fortune that Bell already was accumulating as well as the prejudices in force, that at that time existed, against immigrants in a country precisely founded and developed by millions of immigrants.


Right number …

Meucci died more than 120 years ago, but even now, in te schools of the UNteed States, and of many other countries, teachers and books tell students that the inventor of the telephone was the American usurper Alexander Grahan Bell and not the tireless Italian Antonio Meucci.

Nevertheless more than a century ago after that falsehood, the Congress of the United States was compelled to unanimously approve the recognition of Antonio Meucci as the actual inventor of the telephone.

Italo-American Congressman Vito Fossella presented the motion where he condemned Graham Bell’s fraud and recognized “Antonio Meucci’s work in the invention of the telephone thingy years prior to when Bell patented it.”

Terrible as a businessman, without any contact in the high circles, without financial resources, immigrant who did not know the language, Antonio Meucci was, nevertheless, a brilliant inventor, who fought until his death in order to receive the honors that he, and nobody else, deserved, by discovering a device that have made possible to revolutionize the mankind.

Havana has the honor of being of being the exact place of the world geography where Antonioo Meucci invented and improved the telephone, while he lived at the Paseo del Prado and worked at the Teatro Tacon.

That’s why can be said that the first phone calls of the world, where made in Havana.



http://www.cubanow.net/global/loader.php?&secc=6&cont=show.php&item=1153
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'Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."..Martin Luther King jr...

[jack]

Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci (April 13, 1808–October 18, 1896) was an Italian inventor. He is widely credited, albeit somewhat controversially, as the inventor of the telephone.[citation needed]. In June 2002, the United States House of Representatives passed a bill that "expresses 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."
wikipedia
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Let the adventure continue

[mellisas]

[mellisas]

more about ANTONIO MEUCCI.



An invention none of us could live without, a tool of modern communications so basic that many of today's business and social activities would be inconceivable in its absence, the telephone, is at the center of a series of events so strange as to amount to a "whodunit."

Most of us were brought up on the story of Alexander Graham Bell, the romantic figure of an inventor with dash and charm. Some of these favorable impressions must have come from the famous, if apocryphal, "Come here Watson, I want you" legend of the invention of the device, a tradition augmented by the movie version of the tale, in which actor Don Amiche became more or less permanently attached to the persona of Bell.

But it seems that history must be rewritten if justice is to be done to an immigrant from Florence, Italy: Antonio Meucci, who invented the telephone in 1849 and filed his first patent caveat (notice of intention to take out a patent) in 1871, setting into motion a series of mysterious events and injustices which would be incredible were they not so well documented.

Meucci was an enigmatic character, a man unable to overcome his own lack of managerial and entrepreneurial talent, a man tormented by his inability to communicate in any language other than Italian. The tragic events of his personal and professional life, his accomplishments and his association with the great Italian patriot, Garibaldi, should be legendary in themselves but, curiously, the man and his story are practically unknown today.

Antonio Meucci was born in San Frediano, near Florence, in April 1808. He studied design and mechanical engineering at Florence's Academy of Fine Arts and then worked in the Teatro della Pergola and various other theaters as a stage technician until 1835, when he accepted a job as scenic designer and stage technician at the Teatro Tacon in Havana, Cuba.

Absolutely fascinated by scientific research of any kind, Meucci read every scientific tract he could get his hands on, and spent all his spare time in Havana on research, inventing a new method of galvanizing metals which he applied to military equipment for the Cuban government; at the same time, he continued his work in the theater and pursued his endless experiments.

One these touched off a series of fateful events. Meucci had developed a method of using electric shocks to treat illness which had become quite popular in Havana. One day, while preparing to administer a treatment to a friend, Meucci heard an exclamation of the friend, who was in the next room, over the piece of copper wire running between them. The inventor realized immediately that he held in his hand something much more important than any other discovery he had ever made, and he spent the next ten years bringing the principle to a practical stage. The following ten years were to be spent perfecting the original device and trying to promote its commercialization.

With this goal, he left Cuba for New York in 1850, settling in the Clifton section of Staten Island, a few miles from New York City. Here, in addition to his problems of a strictly financial nature, Meucci realized that he could not communicate adequately in English, having relied on the similarities of Italian and Spanish during his Cuban residence. Furthermore, in Staten Island, he found himself surrounded by Italian political refugees; Giuseppe Garibaldi, when exiled from Italy, spent his period of United States residency in Meucci's house. The scientist tried to help his Italian friends by devising any number of industrial projects using new or improved manufacturing methods for such diverse products as beer, candles, pianos and paper. But he knew nothing of management, and even those initiatives which succeeded were to have their profits eaten up by unscrupulous or inept managers or by the refugees themselves, who spent more time in political discussion than they did in active work.

Meanwhile, Meucci continued to dedicate his time to perfecting the telephone. In 1855, when his wife became partially paralyzed, Meucci set up a telephone system which joined several rooms of his house with his workshop in another building nearby, the first such installation anywhere. In 1860, when the instrument had become practical, Meucci organized a demonstration to attract financial backing in which a singer's voice was clearly heard by spectators a considerable distance away. A description of the apparatus was soon published in one of New York's Italian newspapers and the report together with a model of the invention were taken to Italy by a certain Signor Bendelari with the goal of arranging production there; nothing came of this trip, nor of the many promises of financial support which had been forthcoming after the demonstration.

The years which followed brought increasing poverty to an embittered and discouraged Meucci, who nonetheless continued to produce a series of new inventions. His precarious financial situation, however, often constrained him to sell the rights to his inventions, and still left him without the wherewithal to take out final patents on the telephone.

A dramatic event, in which Meucci was severely burned in the explosion of the steamship Westfield returning from New York, brought things to an even more tragic state. While Meucci lay in hospital, miraculously alive after the disaster, his wife sold many of his working models (including the telephone prototype) and other materials to a secondhand dealer for six dollars. When Meucci sought to buy these precious objects back, he was told that they had been resold to an "unknown young man" whose identity remains a mystery to this day.

Crushed, but not beaten, Meucci worked night and day to reconstruct his invention and to produce new designs and specifications, clearly apprehensive that someone could steal the device before he could have it patented. Unable to raise the sum for a definitive patent ($250, considerable in those days), he took recourse in the caveat or notice of intent, which was registered on December 28, 1871 and renewed in 1872 and 1873 but, fatefully, not thereafter.

Immediately after he received certification of the caveat, Meucci tried again to demonstrate the enormous potential of the device, delivering a model and technical details to the vice president of one of the affiliates of the newly established Western Union Telegraph Company, asking permission to demonstrate his "Talking Telegraph" on the wires of the Western Union system. However, each time that Meucci contacted this vice president, a certain Edward B. Grant, he was told that there had been no time to arrange the test. Two years passed, after which Meucci demanded the return of his materials, only to be told that they had been "lost." It was then 1874.

In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell filed a patent which does not really describe the telephone but refers to it as such. When Meucci learned of this, he instructed his lawyer to protest to the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, something that was never done. However, a friend did contact Washington, only to learn that all the documents relevant to the "Talking Telegraph" filed in Meucci's caveat had been "lost." Later investigation produced evidence of illegal relationships linking certain employees of the Patent Office and officials of Bell's company. And later, in the course of litigation between Bell and Western Union, it was revealed that Bell had agreed to pay Western Union 20 percent of profits from commercialization of his "invention" for a period of 17 years. Millions of dollars were involved, but the price may been cheaper than revealing facts better left hidden, from Bell's point of view.

In the court case of 1886, although Bell's lawyers tried to turn aside Meucci's suit against their client, he was able to explain every detail of his invention so clearly as to leave little doubt of his veracity, although he did not win the case against the superior - and vastly richer - forces fielded by Bell. Despite a public statement by the then Secretary of State that "there exists sufficient proof to give priority to Meucci in the invention of the telephone," and despite the fact that the United States initiated prosecution for fraud against Bell's patent, the trial was postponed from year to year until, at the death of Meucci in 1896, the case was dropped.

The story of Antonio Meucci is still little known, yet it is one of the most extraordinary episodes in American history, albeit an episode in which justice was perverted. Still, the genius and perseverance of an Italian immigrant - genius, poor businessman, tenacious defender of his rights against incredible odds and grinding poverty - is a story which must be told. Antonio Meucci is waiting to be recognized as the inventor of a key element in our modern culture.

http://www.italianhistorical.org/MeucciStory.htm
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'Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed."..Martin Luther King jr...

[The Decay of Meaning]

Very very interesting! Nice find mellisas!!! Thank you!

[cubano]

Thanks for posing it Lisa, our italian members will be proud of it
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"Like stones rolling down hills, fair ideas reach their objectives despite all obstacles and barriers. It may be possible to speed or hinder them, but impossible to stop them." - José Martí