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years from the date in question.”
On June 25, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his telephone at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The Bell Telephone Company was formed in 1877. On March 13, 1879, New England Telephone and Bell Telephone merged to become the National Bell Telephone Co. On April 17, 1880, National Bell reached a settlement with Western Union and became the American Bell Telephone Company. In March 1885 American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) was incor- porated as a subsidiary of Bell Telephone to build and operate a long distance telephone network.
Meucci increased his efforts to capitalize on his rightful invention. After 1880, there were widespread complaints of poor service by the Bell Company. With the aid of Meucci, a syndicate was formed in 1883 and named the Globe Telephone Company. Globe “...(was) formed for the purpose of carrying on some part of its business out of the State of New York ...and the names of the town and county in which the principal part of the business of said Company within this State is to be trans- acted are the City and County of New York.” Using Meucci’s inventions as the basis, Globe planned to build and sell Meucci telephones to that market as well as “...wire, switchboards, insulators, etc., at low rates.” Globe apparently paid Meucci a salary of $150/month until 1886.
Globe had by then obtained Meucci’s rights and inven-
Fig. 7. First text page of the 1871 Caveat. (Garibaldi-Meucci Museum)
tions. They secured evidence that they believed would con- vince (at the proper time) the highest court in the U.S. of the truthfulness of the statements made in a Complaint filed with the U.S. Justice Department by Globe late in 1885. That Complaint disputed the Bell patents on the basis that the Meucci Caveat filed five years prior to Bell had rendered the Bell Patents as worthless. The ensuing trial led to the Meucci deposition and exhibits supporting his prior discoveries and inventions. The case was heard in U.S. Federal Court during which affidavits by many people from Staten Island and New York attested to the existence of and experience speaking with the Meucci telephone instruments. Bell then sued Globe for infringement in the Southern District Court of New York, presided by Judge William James Wallace. The belabored testi- mony by Meucci was in Italian, translated to English, then fre- quently misinterpreted and challenged by the testimony of Charles R. Cross, a Professor-Engineer from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the end, Judge Wallace ruled in favor of Bell, accepting Professor Cross’s interpretations, declaring in his judgment brief that that Meucci’s devices were little more than a toy “string telephone.”
For the 1880’s trials, exhaustive searches by all parties to find a copy of the Meucci telephone article in L’Eco and relat- ed information failed. In 1880 the Globe Company offered a $100 reward for “all the numbers of the Eco d’Italia which speak of the telephone of Mr. Meucci from 1859 to 1862.” In 1885, the private collection of L’Eco owned by Dr. John Citarotto of New Orleans was sold to the Bell Company for $125. There were many issues missing from that 1857–1881 collection, especially those from 1859 to 1863. To this day, copies of L’Eco d’Italia from and including December 1860, all of 1861, 1862 and 1863 have not been found.
Details about Meucci emerged during the 1886 trial where the defendant, Globe Telephone Company, was being sued by Bell Telephone Company for patent infringement. A 214 page deposition by 77 year old Meucci contained a description of twelve of his 30-odd telephone devices created between 1849 and 1865 (Fig. 2-1 through Fig. 4). When asked at one point in cross-examination “What business did you undertake after you gave up the candle factory?” his answer was “Nothing; what I have done all my life—experi- ments.” (It was within these and other obscure but detailed records in clear Italian and English, including an English translation of his memorandum book for another trial,3 where conclusive proof that Meucci had priority in the inven- tion of the telephone was discovered.)
There followed over several years a series of complaints by Meucci et al. against Bell, and demurs by the U.S. Government,16 ending with case abandonment in 1897; it had by then become “moot” since Bell’s questioned 1876 patent would expire in 1893. Antonio died in October 18, 1889 on Staten Island.
Overall, the U.S. Government actions in response to Meucci’s claims were: March 1886–Bill of complaints in Southern Ohio; December 1886–Ohio Case dismissed; January 1887–Bill of Complaints filed in Massachusetts; Judges sustain demurer by Bell lawyers; November 1887–Government appeals to Supreme Court; November, 1888–Supreme Court reverses verdict, rejects demurer and remands the case for trial;
42 Acoustics Today, April 2007