The story we're telling today is a little bit like a detective story: we'll report it to you exactly the way we've heard it by someone who is, from a professional standpoint, a direct descendant of the events it contains, and that is Sartorio Telecomunicazioni, which has been for more than ten years now in the business of integrated systems and telephone switchboards. And the telephone is actually the one topic we want to talk about, or its invention, to be more precise: it's a story you might have partially heard, perhaps, and maybe w'll be dropping a few famous names; but you may also hear a few less famous names, which are, though, no less important... as we told you, it's a detective story, so do expect a few surprises. And actually, a surprise is really what we'll start from: our story begins, of all things, with a flute.
It is 1849, and a young italian inventor, Innocenzo Manzetti, agend only twenty-three, has built a bizarre automaton. It's a life-sized sitting man; hidden inside, are the mechanisms, levers, and pneumatic tubing which, as indicated on a programmable cylinder, allow the automaton to move its fingers and lips on a flute, and, once gears are loaded, play up to tweve different arias. Manzetti already has gret plans for the future of its creation: years later, he will succeed in connecting the automaton to an organ, and allow it to play the flute by moving its fingers matching the notes struck by the organist himself, thus becoming capable of playing any musical piece. But one goal still eludes him, remainig just outside of his reach: giving it a voice. For five years Manzetti has had in mind, to this purpose, a project of some sort of "talking telegraph", but he doesn't yet know how to build one.
Change of scene. Five years have passed, and we are in Paris: another young man, this time a telegraph operator named Charles Bourseul, publishes an article on "L'Illustration", narrating of his experiments on transmitting sound and voice through electric current, by a thin vibrating membrane generating electrical waves that may in turn command the vibration of a remote membrane, thus transporting sound from one place to another.
In the meanwhile, across the Ocean, in Staten Island, another Italian inventor, named Antonio Meucci, is demonstrating his latest project, which operates on very similar principles to those described in the article just published on "L'Illustration". The signal is actually very weak, but what's amazing is the fidelity of the transmitted sounds.
Meucci though is a good inventor, but a terrible salesman: he has no initiative, he barely can speak English, and he has little if any luck: all these factors make it so that he cannot find a way to introduce his "telectrophone" on the market. Actually, Meucci remains poor: so poor that, after 1874, he cannot even scrounge up the ten dollars to renew his patent, which expires.
And so, here we are at the keypoint. It is february the 14th, 1876, and on the same day, a few hours apart, two almost identical patent requests are presented for a telephonic device: One by a Mr. Elisha Gray, from Chicago, and another, a few hours later, by the lawyers of professor Alexander Graham Bell, a Scotsman. Nonetheless, a few days later, it is tha latter who is granted the patent. What has happened?
A little investigation, like in any proper detectiev story, leads us to a few interesting clues. Bell's lawyer has found out, a couple days before that fateful Valentine's Day, that Gray's patent request will be presented on the 14th, and that it will mention a liquid-based transmitter. He then added a few lines of his own hand to Bell's own request, describing a vaguely similar system, and presented it. Furthermore, we discover tht Wilber, the patent office clerk, an alcoholic, who is greatly indebted to Bell's lawyer, has shown the lawyer, as well as Bell himself, Gray's patent request, against all regulations, receiving for this deed a full hundred dollars. Also, when he required Bell to prove, as required by the law, that the liquid-based transmitter present in both patent requests had been developed by the Scotsman earlier than Mr. Gray, the clerk accepted as proof an earlier, totally unrelated patent held by Bell. Following all this, in March 1876, it is Bell who sees his request confirmed and his patent granted.
But... are you ready for the coup de theatre? A working telephone already exists, and has existed for twelve years already. It was connected to his automaton, in 1864, by none other than our Innocenzo Manzetti, as reported in an article on the Parisian "Le Petit Journal". But Manzetti has never patented it - actually, he recalls discussing it, instead, with a group of "British Technicians", as found in an article on the Feuille D'Aoste, on August 22nd, 1865, and they proposed to implement his system on several private lines in England. Wondering who these "British Technicians" may be? Well, Manzetti admits to remembering a surname. It's Bell.
The story goes on until our time, and Bell is now legally recognized as the inventor of the telephone. Perhaps it actually is a matter of simultaneous discoveries, perhaps idea theft, perhaps something different yet. In any case, we hope we added a little thrill to your next phone call.
For more than ten years, Sartorio centralini telefonici has been designing and installing integrated telecommunications systems, data lines and telephone switchboards. Meet them at www.sartoriotlc.it
