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How to Steal World's Greatest Invention and Get Away with ItThe invention of the telephone |
By Gabriel Gache, Science News Editor
27th of December 2007, 15:55 GMT
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That's what it was at the time and could easily still be today. The telephone. You might have heard the story on the television or from certain science reports of the first telephone device and how the patent was stolen, but the truth is that nothing was concrete up until a few years ago. So, who is the real inventor of the telephone. Well, one thing is for sure, it wasn't Alexander Graham Bell!
In a book recently published by journalist Seth Shulman, called "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret", the author details the whole story of how,
with the use of aggressive lawyers and corrupt patent examiners, Bell obtained the 'honor' of viewing the patent of the telephone invented by Elisha Gray, after which he constructed a relatively similar device and was credited with the invention of the first telephone.
It seems that the details of the plot can be found nowhere else except in Bell's own lab notebook that, curiously enough, has been restricted for publication by Bell's family until the year 1976, after which it has been made widely available with the help of digital technology. Incriminatory evidence show as Bell struggled with his assistant, in the year 1876, to make a successful transmission over a metal wire with the help of electric currents. However, being unable to reach his goal, he rushed to the patent office in Washington to ask details about the patent filed by Gray.
Shortly after that, he came up with a working prototype of the telephone device, which strangely enough, similar to Gray's patent, includes a rough sketch of a person speaking into the telephone. Other suspicions hovering over the patent filed out by Gray involve the presence of a rushed description of the design of the prototype on the margin of the patent paper. On top of that during the lawsuit that took place in 1878 in order to establish the original inventor of the telephone, Bell refused to testify in the court of law and was rather nervous when he was asked to demonstrate the device in the presence of Elisha Gray.
Nevertheless, all the conflicts might have been to no use as the German inventor Philipp Reis invented a telephone device well before the two Americans, and not only that, albeit it also used an original design that worked on a totally different principle. The irony about the whole telephone patent controversy is that, most of the people today still view Bell as the father of the telephone, Bell stole the patent from Gray, none of them were the first telephone inventors, and the United States Congress declared by resolution, against all common sense, that the true inventor of the telephone was the Italian Antonio Meucci, not Philipp Reis.
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