The tragic tale of the telephone's real inventor, Antonio Meucci

This month, newspapers around the world including the South China Morning Post reported that a wax-covered cardboard disc with the voice of Alexander Graham Bell engraved on it had been recovered in the Smithsonian collections of early recordings.

Reuters reported that the recording was made 128 years ago, "nine years after he placed the first telephone call". On the recording, Bell is heard to say "Hear my voice - Alexander Graham Bell".

On reading this, many Italians like myself had just one thought - that this was the voice of a thief. We know that Bell did not invent the telephone, but stole the idea without acknowledgement from Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci. Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1847, and moved to Canada in 1870. He died in the US in 1922 as a highly respected millionaire scientist entrepreneur. He was indeed a gifted technician but had a nasty side to his personality. He presided for many years over the Eugenics Society, which proposed - and, in several cases, achieved - the forced sterilisation of individuals it considered inferior.

The real inventor of the telephone - which he called "electrophone" - was Meucci, who was born in Florence in 1808 and died impoverished in New York in the closing years of the 19th century. Meucci was a patriot and friend of Italy's national hero, Giuseppe Garibaldi (who also visited Hong Kong, Macau, Canton and Xiamen in 1851).

Meucci begun testing primitive telephones while working in Florence as a theatre technician. Later, for political reasons, he and his wife were arrested and expelled by the Tuscan State. They moved first to Cuba and then to the US.

Having fallen on hard times - his savings disappeared with fraudulent debtors - he spent what little money remained left pursuing his dream of voice communication across vast distances. He filed a patent caveat in 1871 - not a full patent that would cost US$250, which he did not have - five years before Bell filed his patent. When it came time to renew his own patent, Meucci couldn't even raise the US$10 renew fee.