Antonio Meucci: L'Inventore e il suo tempo (review)

Although his claims to have invented the telephone before Alexander Graham Bell were rejected on two occasions by the courts, Antonio Meucci’s supporters now have more information to make their case. Basilio Catania has finished two of his four planned volumes on Meucci’s life and times. Volume 1 covers from his birth in 1808 to 1850, volume 2 from 1850 to 1871. Large appendices comprise about two-thirds of volumes 1 and 2. Volume 3 will span 1871 until his death in 1889, and volume 4 will cover the years after Meucci’s death. Despite its heft, the work is aimed at a popular audience. The oversized appendices and frequent sidebars remove supporting material from the narrative, leaving the main text uncommonly readable. Catania spends as much time on social and political context as on Meucci. The book is rich, although not scholarly, sometimes conveying details through imagined dialogues and suppositions.

Catania challenges the claim that all of Meucci’s telephones were merely acoustic. The 1871 sketches in particular suggest electromagnetic induction, though it is unclear whether Meucci’s 1871 caveat featured these devices or earlier ones. Hopefully Catania will examine the 1871 designs and caveat more thoroughly in volume 3. So far there is ample detail but insufficient critical analysis, though we learn enough of Meucci’s skills to take him seriously.

Meucci had engineering training in Florence and worked as technical properties supervisor at a major opera house from 1833 to 1835, when he and his wife were contracted to work for a new theater in Havana. There Meucci also consulted on civil engineering projects, and about 1843 he began various electrical experiments. In 1849, while administering shocks for a rheumatic acquaintance, Meucci heard the patient’s surprised scream conducted through the wire to a device in his hand, and immediately conceived the idea of a speaking telegraph. Although Catania would like to see “that shout in Havana go down in history as the pioneer of electrical voice transmission,” (p. 321) he first needs to refute claims that it was just acoustic. Meucci failed to do that in court, and the Bell lawyers obligingly concentrated their attacks on the 1849 devices. At any rate, Meucci neither filed a patent for his later designs, nor pursued commercial development before Bell. Thus he joined Philip Reis, Elisha Gray, and many others who had some claim to a working device but lacked Bell’s success.

The mere existence of a working device is insufficient for a successful invention. Invention includes demonstrating a need, marketing a product, and adapting it to changing desires and needs. These details are no less important than the initial technical innovation. Business is the form that successful inventions take, and to ignore the development, refinement and defense of an idea is to ignore the social component of invention and to resort to a kind of technological determinism.

Historians reconstruct the phylogeny of ideas by discovering the branches that stopped as well as the ones that went on. If Meucci was the first to recognize and reproduce electrical transmission of speech, his innovation should be noted. He joins Gray, whose telephones could have been the ancestors of modern ones, but were not. He joins Gustave Whitehead, who may have flown before the Wrights, but did nothing about it. Meucci neither brought his idea to fruition nor evidenced the same progressive understanding and development as Bell. But the Meuccis, Grays, and Whiteheads are important for historians because they teach us about the global process of invention and the spread of ideas.

Catania’s largely uncritical biography of Meucci cannot provide the final assessment of Meucci’s speaking telegraph. But even if in the end Bell receives most of the credit, Reiss, Gray, and Meucci remain interesting cases in their own right, and Meucci particularly so because, successful or not, he had...