h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The h2g2 calendar A3358091 for March 10 includes the invention of the telephone "by Alexander Graham Bell" with a link to A273584 which celebrates this feat.

This entry needs to be rewritten. As pointed out in F34477?thread=260279 the US Government has acknowledged that the inventor of the telephone was in fact Antonio Meucci; Bell merely patented (that is, stole) his invention.

Gnomon, this is part of your territory?

Well if the US Government says so it must be true. They would never lie...

They tell the truth when forced to. This was a moral crime on Bell's part, and it took long enough to expose.

http://www.italianhistorical.org/MeucciStory.htm

Thomas Edison never invented the incandescent light bulb either. It was Sir Jospeh Swann. In this case, Edison bought the company that owned the patent.

Donald

Forgot the link!

http://www.design-technology.info/inventors/page27.htm

There must be lots of these. Entry material?

Bell did not invent the telephone. Did Bell invent the bellphone? Or did Cell invent the cell phone?

Y.

Should we start a campaing to rename the phone the Tony, after Antonio Meucci? Or the Tone? Tonio? Anto-phone-io?

I think Meucci would be pronounced "m-YOU-chee"; would that catch on? "Give me a meucci when you're ready." (Rather than bell)

>> There must be lots of these. Entry material? <<

Could be! James Whatt didnt invent the steam engine either. It was Thomas Savery

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blsteamengine.htm

Donald

Yes . . . however Watt did improve it; did Bell improve anything of Meucci's other than the patent application? Meucci couldn't raise the $250 needed, and he seems to have been treated extremely shabbily by the Western Union Telegraph Company to whom he sent a prototype for testing.
http://www.italianhistorical.org/MeucciStory.htm

Thomas Edison dodn't invent much at all. He employed people to invent things and he took all the credit.

And while we're on a roll:
Stevenson didn't invent the steam locomotive, it was Richard Trevithick.

This is all horses for courses anyway. None of these things are what one would call revolutionary. It's who invented the important ground breaking, life changing, things like the breville toaster and the foot spa bath thingummy that is important, not the terribly wanton gadgets like the phone and the train. I mean, pah, I know which ones I couldn't live without.

Cheese toastie anyone?

*soaks feet*

Going back to the original issue: wasn't it Sir Humphrey Telephone?

Well, ok Bell may not have invented the telephone, but it did invent the second telephone, without which Mr. Meucci's invention would be pretty useless really.
Must have been sat at home waiting for someone to do this so he could phone them up.

Aprently this is quite common with Chemistry too, many of the people accredited with isolating elements first didn't, they were just better known or funded than their rivals. I need to get back my copy of A Short History of Nearly Everything so I can get names and details

Then there are those simultaneous births, like nylon and the Rubik cube; not to mention the theory of evolution (Darwin/Wallace)

differential calculus - "simultaneously" discovered by Newton and Leibnitz

Who invented the Kinetoscope? Edison or rather W. K. L. Dickson? Or did they do it together? And what about the Vitascope?

This thread is drifting . . . perhaps in a useful direction, but it does seem that the case of Meucci is more scandalous than most. I'm going to look for the Update Forum to see if anyone there will take on an update of the "A G Bell" entry