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It’s For You

by | 1st, December 2003

‘ON the day that driving while talking into a mobile phone is made illegal in this country, we ask our readers this simple question: Who invented the telephone?

”I’m on the train”

Those of you who said Alexander Graham Bell, be ashamed of yourselves.

It is well-known and now accepted by the US Congress that Bell stole his idea from Antonio Meucci, a poor Italian immigrant.

But, says the Telegraph, Meucci may not have been the first person to make a working prototype of the phone.

Evidence in the Science Museum in London suggests that a German science teacher called Philipp Reis may have achieved the feat 13 years before Bell.

Tests in 1947 showed that Reis’s 1963 Telephon could transmit speech, albeit faintly, and the receiver would also “reproduce speech of good quality but low efficiency”.

However, the invention was deliberately suppressed by Sir Frank Gill, chairman of Standard Telephones and Cables, because he was trying at the time to win a deal with AT&T, which had evolved from the Bell Company.

Unlike policemen, the telephone gets older every year. In fact, it is only a matter of time before we discover it was, in fact, invented by a hyperactive rabbit with a crack problem from the late paeleolithic era.’



Posted: 1st, December 2003 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink