Summary

Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci (Florence, April 13, 1808 - New York, Oct. 18, 1889) was an Italian inventor and entrepreneur, famous for the development of a long-distance voice communication device, which he called the "telectrophone" and which several sources credit as the first telephone.

In addition to the invention of the telectrophone, Meucci proposed various innovations including stearic candles, oils for paints and varnishes, fizzy drinks, condiments for pasta and rice, and a technique for obtaining good quality cellulosic pulp.

Life in Florence

Antonio Meucci was born in Florence, in the populous neighborhood of Borgo San Frediano, cura di Cestello, at Via Chiara No. 475 (today Via de' Serragli No. 44), at five o'clock in the morning on Wednesday, April 13, 1808. He was the eldest son of 32-year-old Amadigi di Giuseppe Meucci (1776-1864), and 22-year-old Maria Domenica di Luigi Pepi (1786-1862). His great-grandfather had been the painter Vincenzo Meucci. The next day, the infant, first of 9 children, received baptism at the Baptistery of St. John.

On November 27, 1822, at the age of thirteen and a half, Antonio Meucci was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts, to the school of Elements of Figure Drawing, where he studied for six years in addition to the basic subjects, chemistry and mechanics (which included all physics then known, including acoustics and electrology), introduced to the Academy during the French occupation.

At the age of 14 he found his first job, thanks to his father Joseph, who, being janitor of the presidency of the Good Government, approached his superiors to have a position granted to his son, thus enabling him to meet the family's many expenses. On October 3, 1823, the head of the garrisons in charge of the gates of Florence received the following communication:

On May 12, 1824, after applying to fill the position of assistant doorkeeper on his father's advice and waiting about 7 months, Anthony was assigned to St. Nicholas Gate.

A year or so after his promotion to assistant porter, in early April 1825 Antonio found extra work preparing and launching fireworks, with impresario Girolamo Trentini, to celebrate the imminent delivery of Grand Duchess Maria Carolina of Saxony. All went well for the first two evenings, but on the third, April 4, 1825, there was an accident as a result of which eight people were injured. The results of the investigation sent Antonio Meucci, Giuseppe Franci and Vincenzo Andreini to the Criminal Wheel, which gave them the benefit of the doubt. But on June 4 of that year, Antonio was jailed following the accidental fall into a ditch of fellow officer Luigi Ficini, who fractured his leg. Meucci's negligence was established, as he had forgotten to nail the door that stood in front of the ditch. The incident with the fires did not help the outcome of the sentence, which included an eight-day term, the first three of which were on bread and water. Thanks to his father, who wrote a letter of plea to the Good Government, Antonio was released from prison three days ahead of schedule.

At the beginning of 1826 he had himself transferred to the Porta di S. Gallo, closer to home, but on May 2, 1829 he was imprisoned again, for having fallen in love with the daughter of the tractor who openly corresponded but had rejected other young men more than once, including Gaetano del Nibbio, also a porter at the Porta di S. Gallo. As a certain Teresa Paoletti was jealous of this relationship, del Nibbio took advantage of this to rage at Antonio, provoking him with vicious insults, causing him to plant his service in the lurch. Nibbio was able to accuse him of abandonment from his post, revealing the love affair. Meucci was then imprisoned from May 2, 1829, to June 1, 1829, and suspended from pay with condemnation of expenses and barred from dealing with the women involved.

He was then imprisoned 2 more times, the first for talking to one of the women for whom he was imprisoned, and the second for being late for work. He obtained his resignation on July 13, 1830, but later attempted to be rehired as assistant porter by writing a plea to the Good Government. Antonio affiliated with the Carboneria and took part in the uprisings from 1831 to 1833, when he spent three months in jail along with Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi.

According to Carlo Lucarelli, "He was 23 years old when, enraged by the insurrectionary uprisings of '31 that were shaking Italy, he tore up photos of the Grand Duke of Tuscany Leopold II under the eyes of the police."

Given his resignation, Meucci found work for a few evenings at various theaters including the Teatro della Quarconia, the Alfieri, and the Goldoni. Since he had already worked occasionally as a boy at the Teatro della Pergola as a props helper, he tried here as well, and the janitor advised him to return in late October 1833 to meet with impresario Alessandro Lanari and told him that first stagehand Artemio Canovetti was looking specifically for someone who had attended the academy and had an understanding of mechanics. In fact, the Teatro della Pergola was a prodigy of theatrical technique; moreover, behind this theater acted a group of Carbonari who kept contact with Genoa to support Giuseppe Mazzini's action.

By July 1834 Meucci had become not only a props assistant but also Lanari's trusted man, as evidenced by 4 letters exchanged between the two, preserved in the National Library in Florence. The work at the Teatro della Pergola constituted for Antonio an experience of the highest professionalism. In this theater they did a little bit of everything, from mechanics to chemistry, optics to electricity and in general all physics, as well as figurative arts.

It was in the theater that Antonio put the technical training he received at the Academy to good use. In a small closet assigned to him, he implanted his first workshop; here he built an acoustic telephone to communicate via a mouthpiece from the stage floor to the maneuvering trellis, located about 18 meters above the ground, thanks to an acoustic tube that ran embedded in the wall.

This innovation Meucci brought to the theater was welcomed by all the staff and particularly the soffittisti, not so much because of the need to transmit orders silently, but more to allow them to work safely and easily.

It was here that he met Maria Matilde Ester Mochi, with whom he married on August 7, 1834 in the church of S. Maria Novella. The two asked to be dispensed from the banns of their marriage, thus avoiding the disclosure of Antonio's address, given his problems with the law.

At that time Italian opera was perhaps at the height of celebrity around the world, and many foreign impresarios were coming to Italy to cast Italian companies. Don Francisco Marty yTorrens, a theatrical impresario from Havana, thought that he could put together a troupe in Italy, have them debut and perform for a couple of seasons at the Teatro Principal, Havana's most important theater, and use them, later, to bring prestige to the new Gran Teatro de Tacón when its construction was completed.

He wrote as many as 81 people, for a wide variety of roles and at every level, on a five-year contract, including Antonio Meucci and his wife Ester. Ester would be hired as director of the theater's tailoring, and Antonio would take on the functions of engineer, stagehand and scenic designer. They would also be able to stay, when construction was completed, in one of the apartments that were planned in the annexes of the new theater. The offer was gladly accepted by the Meucci couple, who were induced to leave Florence also because of the problems they had with the justice system, which, among other things, did not allow them to obtain passports, thus forcing them to leave the Grand Duchy more or less clandestinely.

Don Francisco chartered a Sardinian brig called Coccodrillo to the port of Livorno that was approved for the transport of goods but could easily be adapted to carry passengers. For that ship, the captain was not required to file a passenger list with the captain's office since, formally, he was not supposed to have any. Thus gave the news of the departure from Livorno of Don Francisco's crew in the Port-Franco of Livorno Trade Newspaper of October 7, 1835:

As can be seen, no mention of the 81 passengers; on the contrary, this is how Havana's El Noticioso y Lucero newspaper reported the arrival on December 17, 1835:

Havana

The 15 years in Havana were for Mr. and Mrs. Meucci the happiest and most profitable of their lives. The contract was for five renewable years and included, in addition to salary, free housing and service personnel. Here Antonio had the opportunity to talk with Don Manuel Pastor, chief technical and mechanical engineer and inspector of the island's fortifications.

Given his lack of knowledge in the field of chemistry, Pastor consulted Meucci on the water problem in relation to the problems that were occurring at the brand new Fernando VII aqueduct, built under his direction. Antonio's intervention aimed at solving the problems related to the hardness of the water and the presence of various pollutants that the mechanical filters could not retain. The problem was solved with constant chemical analysis and subsequent calibrated additions of appropriate substances such as soda ash.

This intervention led him to be so successful that, in 1885, Domenico Mariani at the Bell trial

In the spring of 1838, having completed the premises of the Grand Theater annex, Antonio and his wife moved there. Here Meucci had at his disposal a large workshop-workshop for the tools and machinery of the theater, and Ester had at her disposal a large workshop for theatrical tailoring. Antonio was fascinated by chemistry and one of the first techniques he tried was the preservation of deceased bodies. In fact, with the development of cross-ocean shipping, the preservation of deceased bodies took on considerable commercial importance, especially because of the need to bring back in good condition the bodies of people who had died in the new world. It was therefore a good business deal that, given the investment made in the purchase of expensive materials and equipment, was not successful.

In early 1842 Antonio became interested in reading some books dealing with electroplating, that is, the electrochemical coating, by means of special batteries, with gold or silver of objects made of less valuable metals such as iron, brass or copper. In October 1843, a new governor, Leopold O'Donnell, was sent from Spain, who, in order to save time and money on supplies for the Spanish army, entered into a contract with Meucci lasting about 4 years to galvanize anything that was required, including some private objects. Antonio Meucci was the first to introduce electroplating to America.

Meucci's popularity in Havana increased to such an extent that, on December 16, 1844, an evening of honor was dedicated to him at the Gran Teatro de Tacón, which, after a violent hurricane and a brief reopening, was renovated thanks to the general direction of the works entrusted to Antonio Meucci himself. He introduced a new curtain complex and a new ventilation system that he conceived, even installing a new machine imported from the United States with which the stage could be raised and lowered in a matter of minutes. Antony is also said to have been close to the insurgents, helping with money in the 48' revolution.

It was in the course of electrotherapy experiments that Antonio Meucci discovered, in 1849, the transmission of voice by electricity, thus becoming, by far, the first electric telephone pioneer in history. Antonio immediately gave his system the name "talking telegraph," later renamed telectrophone.

Since the Tacón theater had been inactive since February 1, 1848, and the contract with O'Donnell had expired, Antonio did not have much to do except galvanize objects for private individuals. It happened that some of his medical friends, discussing with him Mesmer's electrical therapeutic systems, on which Meucci had been reading up, asked him to have them tested on some patients, mostly suffering from rheumatism.

During the Bell process

Meucci further stated, again during the Bell trial.

The expression I put the same instrument to my ear should not be understood, at least for that first time, to mean that Meucci deliberately put his instrument close to his ear, but that he heard the cry coming from the instrument accidentally close to his ear, since that instrument was held in his left hand in such a way that he could move the clamp between the various batteries, thus allowing the voltage regulation necessary for therapeutic purposes. Thus, had Meucci not followed Mesmer and Bertholon's absurd prescription to place himself in electrical communication with the patient (most likely for the purpose of adjusting the voltage to the most appropriate voltage), he would not have discovered his talking telegraph.

New York

In 1850 the third renewal of Mr. and Mrs. Meucci's contract with Don Francisco, to whom, in turn, the government concession for the exclusive management of theatrical performances in Havana was expiring. Many of Meucci's friends advised him, especially after hearing the account of the experiments he had performed, to move to New York, because at that time there was no better ground to exploit his ingenuity. Moreover, there was a real possibility that the governor had learned of the money sent to Garibaldi, which was not very worrisome given Antonio's good reputation, but still not to be underestimated.

On March 23, 1850, all the members of the Italian Opera, along with the full family of the impresario, who had seen fit to devote himself to organizing performances in the United States, given the growing interest in opera among Americans, left for Charleston. Antonio did not leave with them, most likely due to the death of his daughter, which occurred close to the planned departure. This news would result from only one source believed to be reliable, "The Sun," which reported thus in the obituary of Antonio Meucci published on October 19, 1889: "In 1850 Meucci came to New York from Cuba, where his only child, a girl of 6, had just died." The fact that no children had been born to the couple in the previous 10 years could be explained by the severe form of syphilis contracted by Antonio at the age of 21, which could have induced some degree of infertility.

On Sunday, April 7, 1850, the Diario de la Marina gave the news of the imminent departure of Mr. and Mrs. Meucci. The departure of the Norma, an American ship, was first set for April 16, but left instead on Tuesday, April 23, 1850.

The move away from Havana also benefited his wife Ester, given the significant amount of moisture that was detrimental to her health.

On May 1, 1850, the Meucci couple landed in New York, settling almost immediately in Clifton, a small neighborhood on Staten Island, where they remained until their death. Here in the same year Meucci visited with Giuseppe Garibaldi the Masonic Lodge "Tompkins." Antonio bought a cottage (now transformed into the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum) and opened a stearic candle factory, according to a design of his own. Garibaldi, who also came to New York, was hosted by Meucci between 1850 and 1853, as we can see from his Memoirs in which he writes:

Although the factory was the first of its kind in the Americas, it was not very successful, and Antonio later turned it into a lager brewery, which was in great demand in the area. This last attempt also failed because of a certain J. Mason, to whom Meucci had entrusted the administrative and commercial management.

On November 13, 1861, Mr. and Mrs. Meucci's cottage, with all its contents, was sold at auction, but fortunately the buyer allowed them to live there without paying any rent. From then on, their economic situation continued to deteriorate further.

In 1854 his wife Ester was bedridden by a severe form of rheumatoid arthritis, which left her permanently disabled until her death on December 21, 1884. Anthony, in order to communicate with his wife on the second floor of their cottage, put his 1849 Havana discovery to good use and made a permanent telephone link between the bedroom and the cellar, then from there to his outside laboratory.

Subsequently, from 1851 to 1871, Meucci tried on the link more than thirty telephones of different types of his own design. He succeeded in obtaining a first satisfactory result between 1858 and 1860, using a permanent magnetic core, coil, and diaphragm, but it was only between 1864 and 1865 that he succeeded in making a practically perfect one.

This telephone had all the requisites of a modern one; in fact, the problem of the leather diaphragm had been solved, replaced with an all-metal one that could be clamped around its entire circumference thanks to a shaving box whose lid was pierced to obtain an acoustic cone, and also solved were the problems concerning long-distance communication, which Bell Laboratories would identify many years later. In the same year, news was given in the press of the invention of a telephone by Innocenzo Manzetti from Valle d'Aosta. Antonio on this occasion claimed his priority, in a letter sent to the director of Commerce in Genoa on October 13, 1865, and which was published on December 1. In addition, on July 30, 1871, a further misfortune was added to the already uneasy economic situation by the explosion of the Westfield ferry, which connected New York to Staten Island, and which rendered Meucci infirm for many months. Nevertheless, still recovering, he worked hard to make his invention operational.

On December 12, 1871, Meucci founded the Telectrophone Company with three Italians, whose primary objective was to carry out all the necessary experiments for the realization of the telectrophone. The contract also provided for extending the company's activities to every state in Europe and the world, in which the Telectrophone Company aimed to obtain patents, form subsidiaries and grant licenses. However, the company dissolved within a year, and, having failed in an earlier attempt in 1860 to propose sponsorship of the invention to some Italian entrepreneur, on December 28, 1871 Antonio Meucci filed with the U.S. Patent Office, in Washington, Caveat No. 3335 entitled Sound Telegraph in which he described his invention, waiting to find the $250 to file a regular patent.

In the summer of 1872, Antonio Meucci approached Vice President Mr. Edward B. Grant of the American District Telegraph Co. of New York, for which Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray were consultants, to be allowed to test his telephone in that company's telegraph lines. Since Grant, after promising his help, tergiversated under various pretexts, after two years Meucci requested the return of the delivered descriptions and drawings, but was told that they had been misplaced. By December 1874, Antonio could no longer find someone to lend him the $10 needed to pay the annual maintenance fee for his caveat, and therefore, it lapsed on December 28, 1874, in accordance with the U.S. patent law of that time. However, some critics have questioned this aspect of the affair, as Meucci was able to patent other inventions (unrelated to the telephone) at a cost of $35 each in the years 1872, 1873, 1875 and 1876.

A Freemason, awarded the 33rd degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite, on Aug. 8, 1888, he presided over the sight initiation of an Italian diplomat in New York City by proxy of Grand Master of the Grand Orient of Italy Adriano Lemmi.

On Friday, Oct. 18, 1889, at 9:40 a.m. antidawn, Antonio Meucci died at his home in Clifton, Staten Island, shortly before the Globe Telephone Company filed its judgment, still confident of full recognition of his invention. His ashes are at the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum in New York, along with the grave of his wife Ester.

In addition to the "electric voice transfer," Meucci invented and patented many other instruments based on chemical and mechanical processes. He held and filed as many as 22 patents, including:

After Johann Philipp Reis (1860), Meucci's failure to renew the $10 caveat because of his financial difficulties allowed Bell in March 1876 to file a patent application for the electric telephone he developed.

As soon as he learned that Bell had been granted a patent for the telephone, Antonio Meucci claimed priority in every forum and at every opportunity. That priority was based on the fact that his invention was in the public domain in the New York area and therefore, under current law, the Bell patent did not constitute a "new and useful art...not first known or used in this country...."

As Antonio Meucci was a respected member of New York's Italian immigrant community and a person well liked by all, there were many who asked the U.S. government to cancel Bell's two patents on the telephone. On Sept. 29, 1885, The Globe Telephone Co. of New York acquired Antonio Meucci's rights and forwarded a petition to the U.S. Attorney General claiming Antonio Meucci's priority in the invention of the telephone. The American press gave much prominence to the Globe Telephone Company's action, openly siding with Antonio Meucci.

The Bell Telephone Company, which held the patents, playing fast and loose, sued Globe and Meucci in New York District Court on November 10, 1885, for patent infringement. The U.S. government initiated a series of public hearings at the Department of the Interior, headed by Lucius Q. C. Lamar, to ascertain the merits of the various petitions.

On December 22, 1885, the assistants to H. L. Muldrow and G. A. Jenks, prepared a conclusive report, in which they claimed to have gathered sufficient evidence in favor of Antonio Meucci. In 1886, in the first of three trials in which he was involved, Meucci went to the stand as a witness in hopes of establishing his priority in the invention of the telephone. The evidence presented by Meucci on this occasion was challenged on the grounds that it lacked material evidence, as it had allegedly been lost at the American District Telegraph (ADT) laboratory in New York. The ADT merged with Western Union to become a subsidiary only in 1901.

On January 13, 1887, the U.S. government sued the Bell Company in the state of Massachusetts, where it had its registered office. While that suit was pending, the Bell Company obtained a local victory over Globe Telephone and Meucci from the New York District Court, thanks to a ruling by Judge William J. Wallace, issued on July 19, 1887, that Meucci had made "mechanical" telephones, not electric ones. This ruling was called by Italian-American historian Giovanni Schiavo one of the most glaring miscarriages of justice in the annals of American justice.

The Globe appealed and, subsequently, the case was sent back to the Supreme Court in Washington, DC. There, on November 12, 1888, the Honorable William H. H. Miller reversed the judgment of the Massachusetts District Court and definitively reaffirmed the lawfulness of the U.S. Government's action. Confident of a favorable outcome to the Government's action against the Bell Company, the Globe Telephone Co. abandoned its appeal of the New York District Court's lower court ruling.

The "United States v. Bell" trial was postponed several times until 1897, when, to prevent the U.S. government from further increasing the already enormous costs it had borne up to that point, but also because of the now-overdue death of Antonio Meucci, it was closed.

The device described in Meucci's original patent application described a mechanical (not electric) telephone capable of transmitting acoustic vibrations mechanically through a taut cable, a conclusion reached by several scientific publications ("The court further held that Meucci's caveat did not describe any element of an electric speaking telephone..." and "The court held that Meucci's device consisted of a mechanical telephone consisting of a mouthpiece and an earpiece connected by a cable, and that beyond that Meucci's invention was pure imagination.").

Christopher Beauchamp, wondering who invented the telephone, notes that the granting of patent rights "far from being a mere matter of scientific curiosity became the key to controlling the entire telephone industry, but that this is actually a matter of broader historical interest."

Subsequently, an investigation by Italian-American historian Giovanni Schiavo argued the groundlessness and irregularities of the trial. Supreme Court Justice D.R. Massaro invited engineer Basilio Catania (a telecommunications expert and former director general of the CSELT research center) to present at a public lecture at New York University the evidence he had found.

On June 11, 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution calling for recognition of his "life and achievements" as well as his contribution in the invention of the telephone. The interpretation of the resolution is controversial because it does not credit him as the actual inventor of the telephone, but as having made a contribution. Such a resolution was proposed in the U.S. Senate but not voted on. Canada's House of Commons, ten days after the U.S. resolution, voted unanimously on a parliamentary motion recognizing Alexander Graham Bell as the inventor of the electric telephone.

Text of the Resolution of the House of Representatives

(Seven autograph letters from Meucci to Prof. Carlo Paladini are preserved in the State Archives of Lucca, where the writer found them by chance.)

Sources

1. Antonio Meucci
2. Antonio Meucci
3. ^ "Meucci, Antonio". Lexico UK English Dictionary. Oxford University Press. Archived from the original on 16 April 2022.
4. ^ Nese & Nicotra 1989, pp. 35–52.
5. ^ a b c Carroll, Rory (17 June 2002). "Bell did not invent telephone, US rules". The Guardian. London, UK.
6. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Meucci, Sandra. Antonio and the Electric Scream: The Man Who Invented the Telephone, Branden Books, Boston, 2010; ISBN 978-0-8283-2197-6, pp. 15–21, 24, 36–37, 47–52, 70–73, 92, 98, 100.
7. ^ Manifestazioni per il bicentenario della nascita di Antonio Meucci, archive date 22 July 2011.
8. ^ Una risoluzione approvata dalla Camera dei Rappresentanti degli Stati Uniti d'America l'11 giugno 2002 ha chiesto di riconoscere il lavoro e i contributi di Meucci verso l'invenzione del telefono.
9. 1 2 Иванов Александр. Антонио Меуччи (Antonio Meucci)  (неопр.). telhistory.ru. Музей Истории Телефона. Дата обращения: 30 апреля 2020. Архивировано 5 февраля 2021 года.
10. Meucci, Sandra. Antonio and the electric scream : the man who invented the telephone. — Boston, 2010. — (138 pages) с. — ISBN 978-0-8283-2307-9, 0-8283-2307-0.
11. Первым изобретателем телефона признали итальянца Антонио Меуччи  (рус.). rg.ru. Дата обращения: 17 июля 2003. Архивировано 17 сентября 2003 года.
12. 1 2 Палата Представителей Конгресса США, Resolution 269  (неопр.). thomas.loc.gov. Дата обращения: 13 мая 2008. Архивировано из оригинала 11 ноября 2012 года., June 11, 2002 (англ.)
13. «Patronato Presidenza della Repubblica italiana: Meucci inventore del telefono (en italiano)». Archivado desde el original el 30 de noviembre de 2012. Consultado el 25 de noviembre de 2012.