What Was Antonio Meucci Invention Was Supposed to Be

The story of Antonio Meucci could well exist depicted on the stage. His ancestry every bit a theatre technician in Florence, Italy and, afterwards, equally an engineer at the Tacón Theatre in Havana, Cuba gave no hint of the dramatic plough his life would have when he arrived in the U.s.a..

There he developed an invention that would get downwards in history, the telephone, merely economical problems and his difficulty in communicating in English prevented him from being recognized as its inventor, credit for which was attributed to Alexander Graham Bell who was granted a controversial patent.

Antonio Meucci fought until the end of his days to be recognized as telephone'due south inventor. Credit: Radio Marconi

Meucci died on October 18, 1889, poor and embittered, without ever having succeeded in getting the United states of america courts to agree with him. More than a century later, the US House of Representatives finally recognized his legacy.

The happy years in Havana

At the Pergola Theatre in Florence, the young Antonio Meucci (Apr 13, 1808, Florence) was able to put into do his knowledge of engineering, working every bit a stage technician, and it was there that he met the beloved of his life, the costume designer Ester Mochi.

On the Florentine stage, Meucci was already beginning to testify his inventive side and devised a kind of acoustic telephone to communicate between the stage the control room, similar to those that were used in ships to speak between the dissimilar rooms.

But his participation in political movements would land him in prison for a few months and upon his release he decided to emigrate to Cuba with Ester, who was at present his wife. There the couple was embraced by the Tacón Theatre in Havana, where Meucci worked every bit principal engineer and his wife, as costume manager.

These were happy years in which the inventor gave gratuitous rein to his imagination and came up with new devices, amongst them a h2o purification system. He even explored electromedicine, using electric impulses to treat the pain experienced by a man suffering from migraines by placing a modest electrode over his mouth.

And in 1849 he designed the first image of a telephone, the device that would be his great obsession.

An invention for talking to his wife

After fifteen years in Havana, the couple emigrated to the United States in 1850 and settled on Staten Isle (New York). With his savings from his fourth dimension in Cuba, Meucci opened a candle manufacturing plant, where he employed compatriots like Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of the Italian liberation.

In 1856, Meucci designed the telettrofono to communicate with his sick wife. Source: Wikimedia

At that time, Ester began to have wellness problems and was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic disease that confined her to her room. To communicate with her from his laboratory—located on the footing floor of the house—Meucci devised the telettrofono, a type of electromagnetic telephone, in 1856.

From at that place, he designed dozens of new electromagnetic models in which speech was transmitted over vibrating electric currents. To increment the resonance, the paper cones used in the earliest versions were replaced by tin cylinders, which used sparse membranes fixed in copper.

To evidence that his devices worked, and because of the difficulties he had in being understood in New York, he began looking for financing in Italy, but never obtained it. The candle manufacturing plant ended up going bankrupt and, afterwards several legal battles with tax collectors, the Meucci house—today the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum—was auctioned off. The new possessor immune them to remain there, but it was a hard accident to the couple.

The legal battle confronting Graham Bong

The worst was yet to come up. In July 1871, an explosion on the ferry on which the inventor used to travel left him with serious burns. To pay for his medical expenses, Ester sold the designs and models of the telettrofono to a pawnshop, only when Meucci went to recall them they had already been resold.

The engineer then formed a partnership with 3 other Italians and created the Telettrofono Company. His partners warned him of the danger of not protecting his invention with a patent, just since he did not accept the $250 needed to pay for information technology, Meucci could only afford something preliminary—a temporary legal notice called a patent caveat, which cost twenty dollars—which had to be renewed every year and that simply gave a brief clarification of his telephone.

In 2002, the US House of Representatives recognized the piece of work of Meucci in the invention of the telephone. . Credit: María Teresa Toledo.

The departure from the United States of two of his partners acquired the company to dissolve, and Meucci, eager to show the world the benefits of the phone, asked the vice president of the Western Union Telegraph Visitor to exam his invention on the company's telegraph lines, giving him a clarification of the prototype and a re-create of the patent caveat. Afterwards ii years wondering when they would exam his model, the company finally responded that they had lost all his documents.

In 1874, due to a lack of money, Meucci could not renew the patent caveat protecting his invention, and two years afterwards he learned that Alexander Graham Bong, a worker from the laboratories of Western Spousal relationship, had received the patent for the telephone. The litigation brought by the Italian engineer was to no avail. All his claims were contested by the company'due south lawyers, who, in turn, brought him to trial for fraud.

Meucci died in 1889 without justice having been served. In 2002, the US House of Representatives published a resolution stating, "that the life and the achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be best-selling." This recognition came too late for Meucci, merely in time for him to have his place in history among the great inventors.

Laura Chaparro

@laura_chaparro

gatenbybegamseley.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/science/leading-figures/antonio-meucci-the-italian-immigrant-who-couldnt-patent-the-telephone/

0 Response to "What Was Antonio Meucci Invention Was Supposed to Be"

Post a Comment

Iklan Atas Artikel

Iklan Tengah Artikel 1

Iklan Tengah Artikel 2

Iklan Bawah Artikel