American mythology holds that Alexander Graham Bell was the one and only inventor of the telephone. But history is full of examples of inventions that happened in multiple places at about the same time. Was he really the first, or just the first one to make money from it? I have to think there were other people around the world or even elsewhere in the U.S. that were coming across the same ideas that he was.
Elisha Gray also invented a telephone but courts upheld Bell’s patent.
Because Gray was two hours later than Bell in filing the patent paperwork. That’s why Bell was first.
Your timing is almost perfect; Monday, March 10 was the 149th anniversary of Bell’s first phone call.
In Germany it is widely known that Johann Philipp Reis invented the first working telephone, years before Mr. Bell, who saw a model of his invention in Edinbourgh in 1872.
Italians, OTOH, consider Antonio Meucci the pioneer, but he called his invention telettrofono (lit. “telectrophone”) and when presenting his invention never mentioned electricity or electromagnetism, which rendered his invention not apt to be patented. Despite the fact that he used electromagnetism and electricity to convey sounds.
I don’t remember ever hearing this. Shortly after learning who Bell was and “Watson, come here. I want you!”, I learned that a bunch of people were working on the teklephone. That Bell really just put a few existing inventions together and did a little tinkering, and that (as described above) somebody else who independently invented the telephone applied for a patent later the same day Bell did.
In seventh grade or so, our science class watched Connections. Although a British program, it also emphasized that Bell put together a few existing inventions and tinkered a little and that the invention of the telephone at that time was not some great leap only a genius could make, but something that would be inevitably discovered in a few years at most.
Bell infamously cheated.
Note that up until recently, the US was “first to invent” for patents. (Most of the world and the US now are “first to file”.)
While the small filing gap between Bell and Gray was not material then, it does play a role in what happened. Bell paid a clerk to let him see Gray’s patent. Bell then revised his patent to cover some of the stuff Gray was claiming. Such revisions don’t reset things, it’s as if it was in the original filing. Note that it would be up to Gray to prove that the added material wasn’t invented before him. Given the “technology” of document timestamping at the time, that wasn’t going to happen.
Why so many people lionize dishonest people like Bell is beyond me.
Because history is written by the winners?
And the first dispatched message by Reis was a much cooler sentence than Bell’s: “Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat” (The horse doesn’t eat cucumber salad).
This describes 99% of all inventions.
Now I feel bad that my 6th grade history project, a video on Bell, took some artistic liberties and made Gray the villain of the piece, where his attempt to sabotage Bell actually helped the inventor!
Up until Steampunk became mainstream, I thought Thomas Edison was a good man. He was not. Besdes lying, stealing and all kinds of shady business practices, he paid people to go around to various county fairs and such and put on show where they electrocuted animals to prove that competitor Westinghouse use of alternating current was dangerous. He also filmed the electrocution of an elephant.as well
In elementary school, we was a class of older students perform the musical The Electric Sunshine Man. The play was a glowing biograhy of Edison.
It wasn’t until Bob’s Burgers had an episode where Tina does a musical play about the electrocution of the elephant that most Americans heard about the strangely forgotten War Of The Currents.
I thought so too as a child, I read about him in my granny’s Reader’s Digest. Took me about a decade to learn better.
I thought George Washington cut down a cherry tree and copped to the charge out of superhuman honesty.
Legends are created and persist for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with historical fact.
This. And by far the most easiest way IRL to win is to cheat. To the point that you can almost assume that any significant winner is an even bigger cheater. The “ROI” to cheating (whether financial or whatever other measures of merit) is simply astronomical versus the ROI to dogged persistence played straight.
Sports (pro, amateur, casual, or school-sponsored) provides a really crappy metaphor / mental framework for thinking about competition. Sports is the only arena where there are lots of partisan spectators watching both sides closely during every minute of action, and there are (generally) impartial referees staring at everything to enforce the most minor infraction of the rules and there are clear-cut rules that everyone agrees on and agrees apply to them.
None of those things obtain in competition for inventions, promotions, businesses, professorships, romantic partners, etc.
The old saw “All’s fair in love and war” really should be replaced with “All’s fair in everything. Except maybe pro sports, and often there too.” Not that I think it should be so. But it sure seems to be so.
He screwed Nikola Tesla in a manner very reminiscent of a certain shady businessman of the late 20th / early 21st century:
Edison: I’ll pay you an enormous bonus if you solve this very difficult, daunting problem of mine.
Tesla: Done! May I have my bonus, please?
Edison: Haha, just kidding about the bonus! There’s some American humor for you!
Welching on a business agreement once the other side has done their part. Classic American knee-slapper prank!
While working for Edison, Tesla was given the gargantuan task of figuring out how to fix all of the DC power plants. Just by virtue of the plants’ fragility, the task was nearly impossible - which is probably why Edison personally offered to pay Tesla $50,000 (about $1.2 million today) if he could do it. And then he did it. Edison’s response? “You don’t understand American humor.” Tesla never got his money, and Edison got his power plants fixed.
Mumble mumble “Charles Bourseul” mumble mumble…
There’s one legend which I’ve always been suspicious about: the Wright Brothers inventing the airplane.
Sure, they deserve the honor of being the first to fly.
But the legend says “they were just bicycle mechanics, who suddenly invented an airplane, to the great shock of the entire world.”
That always bugged me. Because, see, let me tell ya somethin’–I worked in a bike shop, and I’m a pretty good bicycle mechanic.
But me, I would never try to build an airplane…So I always wondered how the Wright Brothers did.
Well, it turns out that the legend fails to mention that the Wright brothers had a lot of help from other inventors.
Specifically, they had a copy of a book published in Germany which gave very, detailed measurements of airplane wings. The German author had built and tested scale models of wings with various shapes and amounts of curvature,
He tested the wing designs by using a primitive wind tunnel --he dropped each wing down a chimney. and precisely timed how long it took to fall. This gave a measurement of how much lift was being generated by the curvature of the wing.
I saw the book in a museum, and was really surprised–Now I had the answer to my question. Despite all my experience as a professional bike mechanic, I guess I shouldda used a wind tunnel.
I am continually amazed that people do not realize that every single invention is based on a long line of earlier inventions.
The Wright brothers didn’t invent the internal combustion engine, does that mean that since their airplane required an internal combustion engine their invention is discredited? No. They advanced far beyond dropping wings down a chimney - they built an actual wind tunnel and systematically studied lift vs. wing shape. Did they invent the wind tunnel? No. Was it a good wind tunnel? No - it provided useful qualitative but not accurate quantitative results. Was it an advancement on what was done before? Yes.
Did you design and build the bikes?
Maybe it’s a difference of age, but when I was growing up - in the era when the Bell System was still a monopoly for most purposes, Bell was the one and only, just like Edison, and Morse for the telegraph, and to a surprising degree Henry Ford for the car, or at least the assembly line. American inventors were as sacred as the Founding Fathers.
The Wrights really and truly were the first to make a controllable heavier-than-air aircraft. All the competing claims can be easily swatted away.* They deserved the acclaim, because they worked harder, studied more, tinkered more, and out-scienced the supposed scientists of the time, like Samuel Langley. They were five years ahead of the rest of the world.
* I personally found the evidence that crushed Gustave Whitehead’s claim.