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
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