Constants and Variables 163, serendipità edition
I've been focusing lately on old Italian technology.

Browsing through Quora, I ran across a spirited defense of Antonio Meucci as the real inventor of the telephone. Hadn't heard of him before.

I went back through old books as usual and found an inconclusive mess. This article at a telephone collecting blog appears to gather the information objectively.

Meucci was certainly ONE of the earliest experimenters with telephones. No doubt about it. But the stories about extreme poverty and lack of connections don't work, because Meucci and Garibaldi ran a successful candle factory in NYC** and held a dozen patents related to candle-making. So he had money, and he was able to write and acquire valid patents. He submitted a couple of applications for telephony, but they weren't approved.

It's entirely possible that Bell saw some of Meucci's work. Bell was acquainted with the existing work, and didn't pretend to be the first of all inventors. It's also undoubtedly true that Bell had better connections than other inventors. His victory over Elisha Gray was definitely by superior connections, not superior technology.

But Meucci's idea wasn't notably better than the other experimenters, and wouldn't have developed into a large system.

This little excursion wasn't wasted. One of the old Italian books had an ad for an Olivetti device that I can "build", on the same page as the Meucci article. Serendipità!

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** Fussy footnote: I really shouldn't say NYC. The factory was in Clifton, a rich part of Staten Island. Until recently the cities in the various boroughs of NYC were fiercely independent. In the '40s, contestants on quiz shows announced their hometown as Tottenville or Queens Village or Jamaica. New York City meant exactly and only Manhattan Island.

This type of independence doesn't show up in merged cities elsewhere. Ponca was a merger of Ponca and Crosspatch. The two sections are distinct on a map, but nobody ever used or knew the name Crosspatch. The other Manhattan was a merger of Juniata, New Boston, and of course Polistra. Nobody knew or used those terms.

Labels: Constants and Variables

  ¶ 7:37 AM