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April 27 - May 4,2003 |
Calling Antonio Meucci
Catania rings in evidence supporting inventor of telephone
By Nancy MacLeod
Originally Published: 2003-04-13
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Basilio Catania
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In June of last year, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution recognizing Italian-American inventor Antonio Meucci as the rightful inventor of the telephone. This recognition of his achievements was a long-overdue nod to a scientist who was thwarted repeatedly from being so acknowledged during his lifetime.
Meucci had emigrated from Florence to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century after 15 years in Havana, where he had experimented with electronic communications. He first publicly demonstrated his telephone in 1860 in New York, and between 1871 and 1874 paid a $20 annual caveat in lieu of a full patent, which cost $250. After 1874 he could no longer afford even the caveat, and let the licence lapse. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell obtained a patent for inventing the telephone. Although the American Government sued the Bell Company in 1885 and 1887, alleging that Bell had committed fraud, collusion and false testimony to obtain a patent for an instrument Meucci had invented earlier, the telecommunications monopoly prevailed. Meucci was to die in poverty in 1889.
On Monday, April 14 COMITES-Toronto and the University of Toronto are hosting a lecture by noted Meucci authority Basilio Catania. "New Evidence on Antonio Mecca's Contribution to the Invention of the Telephone" will present scientific data and facts and provide an opportunity to formally acknowledge Meucci in Canada.
Catania has had an illustrious career, having taught at the Politecnico of Milan, researching at the Magneti Marelli Radio Laboratory near Milan and the Research Laboratory of the IRI-STET Group in Turin, and working with Bell both in Canada and the United States. He has received the Gold Medal of the City of Milan, the inaugural Eurotelecom Prize, and the Marconi Prize of the Italian Electrotechnical Association.
Since his retirement Catania has devoted his time almost exclusively to researching Meucci. This had not been his plan; rather he had intended to focus on quantum physics. "I began researching on Antonio Meucci a few months before my retirement and have kept researching it up to now," he states. "I was 'captured' by Antonio Meucci, so to say. Moreover, during my fifteen years' research, I have attempted many times to stop it, but, each time something happened that put me back on Mecca's track."
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