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I6KZR > TODAY 08.03.15 01:42l 97 Lines 4093 Bytes #999 (0) @ WW
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Subj: Today in History May 7 : Bell!!!
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Date: dom, 08 mar 2015 01:20:01 CET
From: I6KZR@GB7COW.#44.GBR.EURO (Renzo)
To: TODAY@WW
Subject: Today in History May 7 : Bell!!!
WW
Inviato da: I6KZR@GB7COW.#44.GBR.EURO
Please, let's stop celebrating the profiteers!
Italy hailed the redress of a historic injustice yesterday after the US
Congress recognised an impoverished Florentine immigrant as the inventor of
the telephone rather than Alexander Graham Bell.
Historians and Italian-Americans won their battle to persuade Washington to
recognise a little-known mechanical genius, Antonio Meucci, as a father of
modern communications, 113 years after his death.
The vote by the House of Representatives prompted joyous claims in Meucci's
homeland that finally Bell had been outed as a perfidious Scot who found
fortune and fame by stealing another man's work.
Calling the Italian's career extraordinary and tragic, the resolution said
his "teletrofono", demonstrated in New York in 1860, made him the inventor
of the telephone in the place of Bell, who had access to Meucci's materials
and who took out a patent 16 years later.
"It is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and
achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognised, and his work in the
invention of the telephone should be acknowledged," the resolution stated.
Bell's immortalisation in books and films has rankled with generations of
Italians who know Meucci's story. Born in 1808, he studied design and
mechanical engineering at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, and as a
stage technician at the city's Teatro della Pergola developed a primitive
system to help colleagues communicate.
In the 1830s he moved to Cuba and, while working on methods to treat
illnesses with electric shocks, found that sounds could travel by electrical
impulses through copper wire. Sensing potential, he moved to Staten Island,
near New York City, in 1850 to develop the technology.
When Meucci's wife, Ester, became paralysed he rigged a system to link her
bedroom with his neighbouring workshop and in 1860 held a public
demonstration which was reported in New York's Italian-language press.
Advertisement
In between giving shelter to political exiles, Meucci struggled to find
financial backing, failed to master English and was severely burned in an
accident aboard a steamship.
Forced to make new prototype telephones after Ester sold his machines for
to a secondhand shop, his models became more sophisticated. An inductor
formed around an iron core in the shape of a cylinder was a technique so
sophisticated that it was used decades later for long-distance connections.
Meucci could not afford the 50 needed for a definitive patent for his
"talking telegraph" so in 1871 filed a one-year renewable notice of an
impending patent. Three years later he could not even afford the 00 to
renew it.
He sent a model and technical details to the Western Union telegraph company
but failed to win a meeting with executives. When he asked for his materials
to be returned, in 1874, he was told they had been lost. Two years later
Bell, who shared a laboratory with Meucci, filed a patent for a telephone,
became a celebrity and made a lucrative deal with Western Union.
Meucci sued and was nearing victory - the supreme court agreed to hear the
case and fraud charges were initiated against Bell - when the Florentine
died in 1889. The legal action died with him.
Yesterday the newspaper La Repubblica welcomed the vote to recognise the
Tuscan inventor as a belated comeuppance for Bell, a "cunning Scotsman" and
"usurper" whose per- fidy built a communications empire.
Frase del giorno:
A Jury consists of twelve persons chosen to decide who has the best lawyer.
(Anonimo)
73 Ciao a tutti Renzo.
li, dom 08 marzo 2015 01:12 (+1.00) CET
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