| 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. | 
