Who invented the telephone?

Antonio Meucci.
An erratic, sometimes brilliant Florentine inventor, Meucci arrived in the United States in 1850. In 1860
he first demonstrated a working model of an electric device he called the teletrofono. He filed a caveat
(a kind of stopgap patent) in 1871, five years before Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone patent.

In the same year, Meucci fell ill after he was badly scalded when the Staten Island ferry’s boiler
exploded. Unable to speak much English, and living on charity, he failed to send the $10 required to
renew his caveat in 1874.

When Bell’s patent was registered in 1876, Meucci sued. He’d sent his original sketches and working
models to the lab at Western Union. By an extraordinary coincidence, Bell worked in the very same lab,
and the models had mysteriously disappeared.
Meucci died in 1889, while his case against Bell was still under way. As a result, it was Bell, not Meucci,
who got the credit for the invention. In 2004 the balance was partly redressed by the U.S. House of
Representatives, which passed a resolution that “the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be
recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.”
Not that Bell was a complete fraud. As a young man he did teach his dog to say “How are you,
grandmamma?” as a way of communicating with her when she was in a different room. And he made the
telephone a practical tool.
Like his friend Thomas Edison, Bell was relentless in his search for novelty. And, like Edison, he wasn’t
always successful. His metal detector failed to locate the bullet in the body of the stricken President
James Garfield. It seems Bell’s machine was confused by the president’s metal bedsprings.
Bell’s foray into animal genetics was driven by his desire to increase the numbers of twin and triplet
births in sheep. He noticed that sheep with more than two nipples produced more twins. All he managed
to produce was sheep with more nipples.
On the plus side, he did help to invent a hydrofoil, the HP 4, which set the world water-speed record of
70.84 mph in 1919, which stood for ten years. Bell was eighty-two at the time and wisely refused to
travel in it.
Bell always referred to himself first and foremost as a teacher of the deaf. His mother and wife were
deaf, and he taught the young Helen Keller. She dedicated her autobiography to him.