SCIENCE cover 28 March 2008 1854: Charles Bourseul lays theoretical foundations of the telephone 1857: Antonio Meucci builds the first telephone 1860: Phillip Reis builds the Reis telephone 1876: Elisa Gray builds another telephone 1876: Alexander Graham Bell patents a telephone
Telephone history in a nutshell:
1854: Charles Bourseul lays theoretical foundations of the telephone
1857: Antonio Meucci builds the first telephone
1860: Phillip Reis builds the Reis telephone
1876: Elisa Gray builds another telephone
1876: Alexander Graham Bell patents a telephone

The Last Inventor of the Telephone

Seth Shulman's book "The Telephone Gambit" and its fine review by D. L. Morton Jr. (29 February, p. 1188) focus on the 1876 dispute between Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray over who invented the telephone. In fact, neither of them was first. Interestingly, different views on this topic prevail in different nations. French accounts tend to emphasize Charles Bourseul's theoretical underpinnings of the phone (1854). Many Italians, meanwhile, consider Antonio Meucci to be the real inventor - his phone apparently was operational in 1857 (acknowledged by a 2002 bill of the U.S. House of Representatives). Germans frequently cite the 1860 electric telephone by Phillipp Reis. Compared to all these pioneers, Gray and Bell came rather late. Bell is championed in his home country, Scotland; his adopted home, Canada; and the United States (he became a U.S. citizen 6 years after filing his patent). Unlike his predecessors, however, Bell was able to create a successful phone company, and he thus acquired financial and public relations resources that helped to widely promote his own view of who invented the phone.

What can we learn from this? When the time is ripe for an invention, it tends to be pursued and developed in various places until someone manages to make a public breakthrough. At least in popular culture, much of the credit is bestowed upon the last contributor, even when the essential original insights came from others. As they say: Columbus did not become famous because he was the first to discover America, but because he was the last.

Jürgen Schmidhuber
IDSIA, Galleria 2, 6928 Manno-Lugano, Switzerland
& Robotics and Embedded Systems, Tech. Univ. München, Computer Science, Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching, Germany



Reference to the short correspondence to the left:

J. Schmidhuber: The last inventor of the telephone. Science 28 March 2008: Vol. 319. no. 5871, p. 1759

DOI: 10.1126/science. 319.5871.1759b

Compare this Science link and the Science Podcast of 28 March 2008 (tune in at 35min 43s)!





More heroes of tech and science:
Archimedes
Schickard
Leibniz
Gauss
Darwin
Einstein
Goedel
Turing
Haber
Zuse
Aviation pioneers
Archimedes, greatest scientist ever? Schickard, father of the computer age Leibniz, universal genius, inventor of binary arithmetics, co-inventor of calculus, computert pioneer, philosopher, etc Gauss, greatest mathematician Albert Einstein, greatest physicist Kurt Goedel, founder of theoretical computer science Turing, inventor of the Turing machine Fritz Haber, detonator of the population explosion, probably the most influential person of the 20th century Konrad Zuse, inventor of first working program-controlled computer