Antonio Meucci Facts
Antonio Meucci Facts
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| Interesting Antonio Meucci Facts: |
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| Meucci was born in Florence, Italy, as the oldest of nine children. |
| His father, a government employee, could not afford a full education for him, and Meucci had to drop out of the Florence Academy of Fine Arts after only two years, despite having been the youngest student ever admitted. |
| He had to halt his education in chemical and mechanical engineering, but he managed to continue to study part-time after securing employment of his own. |
| While working as a stage technician for the Teatro della Pergola, Meucci invented a system of communicating between floors of the theater by means of a hollow pipe, much like the ones used on large ships; his earliest model is still working today. |
| He married Esterre Mochi, a fellow employee of the theater, and they immigrated to Cuba after Meucci was imprisoned briefly on suspicion of working to unite Italy. |
| While in Cuba, Meucci invented a number of devices, including an early working telegraph of sorts, and a machine that was used to deliver medical electroshocks. |
| In Cuba's turbulent government, Meucci's cclose friendship with Giuseppe Garibaldi made officials wary of him; he and his wife immigrated to New York with a substantial amount of savings. |
| When his wife fell ill to rheumatoid arthritis, Meucci finally developed what we now know to have been an electromagnetic transmission device that allowed him to communicate with her from different rooms of the house. |
| Alexander Graham Bell is credited with the invention of the telephone, however, largely due to the fact that Meucci's patent application does not mention anything to do with electromagnetic transmission. |
| He developed more than thirty different working models for his telephone, all of which utilized the vibrating diaphragm and electrified magnet model that his notes described in detail. |
| In the time that Meucci worked on his models, his candle factory went bankrupt and he depleted his savings. He was eventually forced to rely on financial support from friends, and therefore never completed the financing of large-scale production of his telephone. |
| At the time that Meucci was seeking Italian investors for his project, the situation in Italy under Garibaldi was too unstable, and citizens were not making investments of that kind. |
| Meucci faced numerous obstacles in trying to prove his model and secure respect and funding for it. |
| Along the way, he invented a means for underwater divers to communicate with the surface by basically waterproofing his existing electromagnetic apparatus. |
| In hotly contested legal battles over the patents, Meucci lost out to the newly formed Bell Telephone, who went on to fight other legal battles with other communication entities. |
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