The Almanac of 22 August brings me to tell a truly amazing story, which took place in Italy a long time ago. The grip is a newspaper article. So it is August 22, 1865 and in a weekly magazine of the Val d’Aosta (Aosta leaf) an article claimed that “some English mechanics, to whom Mr. Manzetti has recently his secret revealed to transmit the word by means of the electric wire, they propose to apply this invention to private telegraphs, the use of which is widespread in England ”.
Who was this Manzetti and what was his secret until recently it was totally unknown to me. I knew of Antonio Meucci, of his invention of a telephone prototype, which he could not patent due to lack of money, and therefore the authorship of the invention is entirely of Alexander Graham Bell. Who exactly was that Valle d’Aosta sheet talking about in the summer of 1865? By Innocenzo Manzetti, born in Aosta on March 17, 1826, forgotten for almost two centuries e rediscovered only recently thanks to the work of two researchers, Mauro Caniggia Nicolotti and Luca Poggianti, who made a couple of books and stimulated an exhibition and then an online museum.
In conclusion, he would be the inventor of the telephone and although the statement seems unlikely, the story of Manzetti is very beautiful. In short, he was a professional surveyor who was an inventor in his spare time. The first invention was a kind of robot that played the flute. On one site we read that in the list of inventions there was “a curious three-wheeled velocipede, water filtering systems, an extremely refined and precise pantograph, a flying parrot, perhaps the internal combustion engine and an object that all housewives of the last hundred years remember, the pasta machine, registered with a patent of 1857 and sold for little money to an English factory that made a great economic profit ”. Very fictional, but it doesn’t stop there. In 1861 Manzetti it seems that he managed to transmit a piece of music two kilometers away. And in 1864 here is the prototype of the telephone: “Two funnel-shaped handsets with a sheep’s paper diaphragm connected by a metal wire and an iron sheet, as well as a coil from which the copper wire started and reached the other device the same. Here the sound waves were transformed into electric waves to reach the other device and become sound waves again ”.
On June 29, 1865, The Independent, a local newspaper, reported it like this: “Mr. Innocenzo Manzetti, of whom we have had the opportunity to speak several times, has informed us of a very surprising application of the telegraph wire. Sounds produced by a device at the departure station can be reproduced at the arrival station; by means of this instrument it will be possible to speak from Aosta to Turin, from Paris to London, etc. we are sure, Mr. Manzetti will succeed in his enterprise and will link his name to the most surprising discovery of our century ”. Actually in that same year another Italian, Antonio Meucci, announced the invention of the telephone in New York (which he called telettrofono), but in a letter sent to the editor of a newspaper in Genoa, Meucci himself recognized the value of Manzetti’s invention which instead disappears from history, with a capital S. Because? It is not known.
According to the two researchers when the American Alexander Bell patented the telephone in 1876, he remembers that years earlier another American with the same name had visited his laboratory: Alexander Bell’s father. Possible? In 1877 Manzetti died and 3 years later his wife sold all his projects to two foreigners who, according to the two researchers, were a German banker and the president of the Bell Telephone Company of Missouri. A sort of international scam. Which deserves in-depth analysis and feedback: 11 June 2002 the American Congress recognized the merits of Antonio Meucci in the invention of the telephone; we may find that another Italian had made an equally important contribution.
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