Who really invented the telephone: Bell, Gray or Meucci?

Bell holds the patent, but the standard account calls the invention of the telephone the culmination of work done by many different people, and says it led to lawsuits over conflicting patent claims. Who deserves the credit is still argued.

Several had real claims. The Reis device did transmit voice sounds electrically over distance, but was hardly a commercially practical telephone in the modern sense. Antonio Meucci filed a patent caveat in 1871, though it did not mention a diaphragm, an electromagnet, or the conversion of sound into electrical waves. In 2002 the US House of Representatives passed a resolution saying that Meucci did pioneering work on the development of the telephone, and it was promptly followed by a motion in Canada's Parliament declaring Bell the inventor.

Bell's own path ran through telegraphs. He began in 1873-1874 with a harmonic telegraph, following Bourseul, Reis and Gray. On 2 June 1875 he and his assistant found that a reed moving in a magnetic field could reproduce the frequencies and timbre of spoken sound. On 10 March 1876 came the first successful two-way transmission of clear speech: "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you."

The sharpest dispute was Elisha Gray. On 14 February 1876 Gray's lawyer filed a caveat for a telephone on the very same day Bell's lawyer filed Bell's application. Which arrived first is hotly disputed: Gray believed his caveat arrived a few hours before Bell's application. In 1886 the examiner, Zenas Wilber, publicly alleged that Bell had paid him one hundred dollars to look at Gray's confidential filing, but his affidavit contradicted his earlier testimony, and historians have pointed out that it was drafted by attorneys for a company trying to take the Bell patents. The Patent Office decided that Gray was undoubtedly first to conceive of the variable resistance invention, but that his failure to act until others had shown the invention's utility cost him the right to have it considered.