Antony Meucci

According to the Congress of the U.S.A. in June 2002 recognized, was the Italian Antonio Meucci and not the North American Bell, the authentic person in charge of the invention of the telephone. While telephone companies, laboratories of technology and institutions pay tribute to Graham Bell like father of the more useful and profitable apparatus possibly of a whole century, the only place where justice to Meucci has become is in the forgotten Staten Island, so not known that few locate it like one of the districts of New York. In a small wood house of the last century is a museum in its memory.

Good, in his memory and in the one of Giuseppe Garibaldi, which until strings of posthumous recognition it has had to share that florentino immigrant who arrived at the U.S.A. in the XIX.Total century, for 7,000 little visitors to the year...

If the things had been of another form, today we would say teletrófono instead of telephone. But in the career of the unfortunate Meucci one crossed the young person and ambitious Graham Bell " Alexander Graham Bell, 1881-1922. Been born in Scotland. Nationalized estadounidense.Creador of the telephone ". The Britannica Encyclopedia does not leave place to doubts. And until this week history either.

The Italian children were, possibly, the only ones of the world who learned in their text books to defy that truth of the historiography. " There was until games trivial type in which they appeared them name of Meucci and Bell. Obvious, the correct answer was first ", remembers the Italian settled down in New York Davide Albertini.

Some tie point exists, however, in the ways of Meucci and Bell towards the telephone. Both they tried to improve the life of the patients. Bell began their works with the intention to make hear the deaf people. Meucci discovered the properties of the transmission of the voice through electrical impulses when it cured ill in Havana.

NOR WORD OF ENGLISH But the biographical coincidences do not arrive much more there. If Bell hardly reached notoriety and money with 30 years, Meucci took the life without course of a perpetual immigrant. Mechanical engineer born in 1808, after trying to find fortune in Cuba, finished in the suburbs of New York without speaking nor a word of English. In fact, he did not speak it in all his life. There, he welcomed in the revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi during his exile and before its triunfal return to Italy.

However Meucci, was touched by the bad luck. Its first telephone prototype finished in a house of persistence. It created it, in 1855, 19 years before Bell to communicate with his woman, who had been quadriplegic.

After other multiple misfortunes, it constructed a second model in 1871 that got to appear in italoamericanos newspapers. Nevertheless, the pocket did not give to support the patent him and it was limited to pay the request, renewable annually by 10 dólares.Mientras, tried without success to obtain that the company of Western telegraphs Union was interested in the invention. Until it got to send the prototype to him.

But in 1874 no longer it had left nor the 10 dollars necessary to renew documents. It ended up losing the patent and the original model finished misled in the laboratories of the Western Union.

The historical injustice was developed in 1876. That Meucci year read in newspapers the name of the young person Alexander Graham Bell like inventor of the "telephone".

According to Emily Gear, director of the humble Meucci-Garibaldi Museum, the tragic destiny of the florentino genius is a sample of " racism " as opposed to immigration, specially present in that época.Cierto that Bell was also immigrant. But rich and of Scottish origin. Son of deaf mother, from his adolescence looked for to transmit the sound using as the electricity. According to he says in text books " Mr. Watson you are you there " it was first stage transmitted through the telephone.

The North American also was rejected by the Western Union.Pero which stops Meucci was a severe misfortune, for Bell it was a stroke of genius. Because, thanks to their enterprising character and the endorsement of their father-in-law, founded very profitable Bell Telephone Company.

As opposed to the power of incipiente industrial Capitalism, the attempts of Meucci to demand the paternity of the invention were inútiles.Algunos historians even insinuate the robbery of the patent and to the italoamericanos never doubt fits to them. Meucci is for them the great insult of the anglian ones: until in The Padrino and the series The Sopranos the outrage is denounced.

The assumption robbery become in a judgment that lasted more of one year. Bell in person, presented the demand to shut up to its rival. In spite of the designs of the request of patent and to the testimonies of witnesses, the process fell of the side of powerful Bell. Two years later, in 1896, Meucci died poor and forgotten.`

Antonio Meucci in Spanish language