In fact, we now know that both Bell and Gray were beaten to the telephone by Antonio Meucci, an Italian who emigrated to Cuba, then New York. He was experimenting with ‘a vibrating diaphragm and an electrified magnet’, the key ingredients of the telephone receiver, back in 1857 and filed a patent caveat in 1871. He built lots of devices and even used them to communicate between floors in his house in Staten Island. The reason history forgot Meucci is because, unlike the determined Bell, he raised no money to develop the idea or defend his patents, and his candle factory went broke, leaving him
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