Credit Where Credit Is Due

When you
use a telephone, do you think of Florentine Antonio Meucci? A little-known mechanical genius, Meucci, who
hailed from San Frediano, suffered
the injustice of seeing someone else get credit for his work. Ten years after
immigrating to Staten Island,
New York, with his wife in 1850,
Meucci made an incredible invention that was not recognized as his until 2002,
through an act of the United States Congress. Although documents confirm that
the Florence native invented the ‘teletrophono‘ in New York in 1860, till he was too
impoverished to pursue a patent. Alexander
Graham Bell, however, had enough money to patent Meucci’s prototype in
1876. In celebration of the bicentenary of Meucci’s birth, the city of Florence has organized a
series of conferences and events. The yearlong celebration of the father of
modern communication begins April 2008 and runs through spring 2009. See the
full program of events at: http://meucci.ing.unifi.it.