Antonio Meucci
Meucci was the real inventor of the telephone and not Alexander
Graham Bell. He was born in Florence in 1808 and died penniless
and impoverished in New York. Pursued for political reasons in
Italy, he migrated to the United States where his savings
disappeared quickly. He filed a patent for an “electrophone” in
1871 but later, abject poverty refrained him from even renewing
his patent for $10. When he was hospitalised for an accident in
1871, his wife had to sell off the entire contents of his lab to pay
for his medication, a meagre $6. He tried his luck again by
handing over his notebooks (with his experiments for a new
prototype) to the Western Union telegraph company but the
executives of the company (and friends of Bell) refused to see
him. Later, the company claimed that they had ‘lost’ Meucci’s
notebooks and notes. Two years later, Bell established a company
with Western Union and filed his patent for a telephone.
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