There are facts so great that we forget to celebrate them sometimes. Like the invention of the telephone. Which was not a sudden event, because many were working on it in different parts of the world, and among these there was also our Antonio Meucci as we know. Epper, the key date among many is that of March 7, 1876: on that day Alexander Graham Bell receives patent number 174,465 to protect his invention, that is “the method and apparatus for transmitting the voice or other sounds by means of electrical undulations “.
He was 29 years old, he was born in Scotland, in Edinburgh, and had worked a little with his father, Melville who was himself an inventor, as well as his grandfather and brother. When he turns 20 he decides to move to America, and goes to live in Boston where he begins to work on ways to transmit voice through electric wires: the idea was to develop the telegraph, transforming it into an instrument capable of making the people at a distance. He thus developed a prototype with which he will send the first famous message to his assistant: “Mister Watson, come here, I need you”. In reality, the invention of the telephone, that patent, have long been disputed to such an extent that there has also been talk of the “telephone conspiracy”. The problem was not Meucci, whose role will be recognized many years later; the problem was Elisha Gray.
And in particular the problem was that on the morning of February 14 of that year, 1876, a representative of Alexander Bell went to file the patent application, preceding Elisha Gray’s almost identical application by a few hours in the same office: “The two inventors knew exactly what the other was working on; and when Gray learned that Bell was about to file the patent, he ran to do the same. But the fact that Bell arrived earlier was no coincidence… ”. According to historian David Hounshell “Elisha Gray had the handicap of being an expert. Gray was so attached to the telegraph industry and its way of seeing the world that he was unable to appreciate the potential of an entirely new system.
But even the president of Western Union, which was the largest telegraph company in the United States, proved unable to appreciate the novelty because when Alexander Bell offered him to buy his patent, he replied: “We are not interested in toys” ”.