It took 113 years after his death for the Florentine engineer and prolific inventor Antonio Meucci to receive the recognition he had sought throughout his lifetime. It did not come until 2002 in Resolution 269 of the U.S. House of Representatives, which finally decided that “the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged”. He had always claimed that he had invented a “speaking telegraph”, or the telettrofono, while working as a theater engineer and decorator in Havana in 1849. He had filed a caveat (notice of invention) with the U.S. Patent Office in 1871, but had not pursued a full patent application because he could not afford to pay the $275 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874. This left the door wide open for Alexander Graham Bell, who worked in the same laboratory where Meucci’s materials had been stored before disappearing to register his telephone patent in 1876 and, in the coming decades, to be credited with inventing the telephone. Instead, Meucci’s explanation was that, after suffering serious burns from an explosion on the Staten Island ferry in 1871, he was hospitalized for months, which left his finances in such a bad shape that his wife was forced to sell his original telettrofono models to a secondhand dealer for six dollars to help with their expenses.
Antonio Santi Meucci was born in the San Frediano quarter of Florence at what was formerly via Chiara no. 475 (today’s via de’ Serragli no. 44, where a plaque in his memory can be seen), on April 13, 1808. The first of nine children, he was christened in the San Giovanni Baptistery. When he was 14 years old, he began his studies at the Accademia di Belle Arti, where the curriculum included chemistry, mechanical engineering and physics, as well as the rudiments of acoustics and electrology. With help from his father, his first job, a year later, was as an assistant gatekeeper. In 1825, he embarked on a second job, preparing the fireworks celebrating the birth of Grand Duchess Maria Carolina of Saxony’s child, but an accident occurred in which eight people were hurt. That same year, Meucci finished up briefly in jail because he was accused of negligence after a colleague fell and broke his leg because he had forgotten to close off a door in front of a trench. Another three incarcerations followed, one for a story involving a jealous woman, another for being late for work at the San Gallo Gate and the third for taking part in insurrections, earning him a three-month stretch in the early 1830s.
Things improved when Meucci began working in theatres, culminating in the Pergola where he invented and installed his first rudimentary acoustic telephone to assist him in his stage managing job. It was also where he met his future wife, Maria Matilde Ester Mochi, whom he married in August 1834. When Don Francisco Marty y Torrens arrived in Florence in search of Italian actors and technicians to work at the new Gran Teatro de Tacón in Havana in 1835, the Cuban theatre impresario assembled a troop of 81 people, which included Meucci, who was to be the theatre’s engineer, stage manager and scenery designer, and his wife as chief costumer. The couple would remain in Havana for 15 years, where Meucci continued his experimentation and perfection of transmitting speech over vibrating electric currents and his work on at least 20 other inventions.
Following the termination of their contracts at the Gran Teatro in 1850, the couple immigrated to America and settled on Staten Island, where they lived for the rest of their lives. Since Ester suffered from crippling rheumatoid arthritis, her husband installed a system for communicating with her from his laboratory in the basement to her bedroom on the second floor. Soon after their arrival on the island, Giuseppe Garibaldi, known as “the hero of two worlds”, also sought refuge in America after his 1849 defeat following the Siege of Rome. He was in dire need of a job to send money to his mother, who was caring for his four children born to Anita de Jesus Ribeiro, his Brazilian wife. (Sadly, Anita, pregnant with their fifth child, had died of malaria near Ravenna during their flight.) Meucci offered the general a job at his candle factory and rented him a room in his home, now the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum. The Florentine had invented a new method for making smoke-free candles, but the factory failed, just like the beer factory Meucci had tried to transform it into. In 1856, Meucci constructed the first electromagnetic telephone and built over 30 types of telephones over the years. In 1861, bankrupt and reliant on public welfare, Meucci was forced to sell his home and all its contents, although the new owner allowed the couple to continue to live there rent-free. In December 1871, Meucci, together with three Italian backers founded the Telettrofono Company, but it too folded within a year.
From the moment he learned that Bell had obtained his telephone patent, Meucci engaged in a protracted and tireless struggle to vindicate his paternity of the invention. In September 1885, the Globe Telephone Company of New York acquired Meucci’s rights and petitioned the U.S. Attorney General to recognize them. Moving quickly, a month later, Bell’s company cited Globe and Meucci for patent infringement. In July 1887, in the first of the three trials involving Meucci, a New York District Court judge found that he had created only “mechanical” and not electric telephones, a travesty given Meucci’s lack of funds to sell his product and his poor English in testifying before the court. Globe appealed and the case was sent to the U.S. Supreme Court, but was subsequently archived because Meucci had died aged 81 on October 18, 1889. Meanwhile, the U.S. Government had taken action against the Bell Company for fraudulent practices, but in 1897 the Supreme Court held that the United States had no standing to challenge the validity of its issued patents simply because it had erred in issuing them.
