Was Alexander Graham Bell the Real Inventor of the Telephone?
Alexander Graham Bell, a Scottish-born scientist and inventor, has long been touted as the inventor of the telephone, but this fact has recently been disputed. Bell immigrated to Canada at the age of 23 and immediately developed an interest in communication machines. His first design was a piano that could transmit its music to a distance using electricity. He went on to study at Boston University, where he eventually developed a telephone that could transmit articulate speech. Bell obtained a patent for the telephone on 7 March 1876, partly thanks to his father-in-law, who helped finance his research. Some years before Bell, Italian-born inventor Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci created an apparatus that could transfer voice to a distance. Meucci didn’t set out to invent the telephone; all he wanted was a way of communicating between the basement and the first floor of his Staten Island home. This precursor of the telephone came to be in 1871, and just three years later, Meucci published
