Antonio Meucci was the
inventor of the
telephone. He was born in Florence on 13 April 1808 and died in 1889. Meucci sued the
Bell telephone company for patent
infringement in 1885, and was joined by the United States Government suing them for
fraud and
misrepresentation in 1887; and Bell to defend their
patent dragged the
trial out past Meucci's death and past the
expiry of their own patent in 1894, so the case became
moot.
Meucci, working in Cuba in 1849, discovered the principles of long-distance induction of telephone lines, call signalling, and a number of other features of telephony, which he called physiophony. He came up with a working model in 1856. He was also responsible for many other electrical discoveries or inventions.
Joke, what use was the first telephone? Correct answer, Alexander Graham Bell gets all the credit because he invented the second one.