Antonio Meucci

Who was Antonio Meucci?

Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci was an Italian inventor and also a friend and associate of the Italian nationalist Giuseppe Garibaldi. Meucci is best known for developing a voice-communication apparatus which several sources credit as the first telephone.

Meucci set up a form of voice-communication link in his Staten Island, N.Y., home that connected its second-floor bedroom to his laboratory. He submitted a patent caveat for his telephonic device to the U.S. Patent Office in 1871, but there was no mention of electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound in his caveat. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound by undulatory electric current.