Fact #1

Who invented the telephone?

Antonio Meucci.

An erratic, sometimes brilliant Florentine inventor, Meucci arrived in the United States in 1850. In 1860 he first demonstrated a working model of an electric device he called the teletrofono. he filed a caveat (a kind of stopgap patent) in 1871, five years before Alexander Graham Bell's telephone patent.
In the same year, Meucci fell ill after he was badly scalded when the Staten Island ferry's boiler exploded. Unable to speak much English, and living on charity, he failed to send the $10 required to renew his caveat in 1874.
When Bell's patent was registered in 1876, Meucci sued. He'd sent his original sketches and working models to the lab at Western Union. By an extraordinary coincidence, Bell worked in the very same lab, and the models had mysteriously disappeared.
Meucci died in 1889, while his case against Bell was still under way. As a result, it was Bell, not Meucci, who got the credit for the invention. In 2004 the balance was partly redressed by the U.S. house of Representatives, which passed a resolution that "the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged."
Not that Bell was a complete fraud. As a young man he did teach his dog to say "how are you, grandmamma?" as a way of communicating with her when she was in a different room. And he made the telephone a practical tool.

---from "The Book of General Ignorance"

hope you enjoyed it. i did.