In July 1871, an explosion on the ferry on which the inventor used to travel left him with serious burns. The new owner allowed them to remain there, but it was a hard blow to the couple. The candle factory ended up going bankrupt and, after several legal battles with tax collectors, the Meucci house-today the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum-was auctioned off. To prove that his devices worked, and because of the difficulties he had in being understood in New York, he began looking for financing in Italy, but never obtained it. To increase the resonance, the paper cones used in the earliest versions were replaced by tin cylinders, which used thin membranes fixed in copper. To communicate with her from his laboratory-located on the ground floor of the house-Meucci devised the telettrofono, a type of electromagnetic telephone, in 1856.įrom there, he designed dozens of new electromagnetic models in which speech was transmitted over vibrating electric currents. Source: WikimediaĪt that time, Ester began to have health problems and was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, a chronic disease that confined her to her room. In 1856, Meucci designed the telettrofono to communicate with his sick wife. With his savings from his time in Cuba, Meucci opened a candle factory, where he employed compatriots like Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of the Italian liberation. An invention for talking to his wifeĪfter fifteen years in Havana, the couple emigrated to the United States in 1850 and settled on Staten Island (New York). He even explored electromedicine, using electrical impulses to treat the pain experienced by a man suffering from migraines by placing a small electrode over his mouth.Īnd in 1849 he designed the first prototype of a telephone, the device that would be his great obsession.
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These were happy years in which the inventor gave free rein to his imagination and came up with new devices, among them a water purification system. There the couple was embraced by the Tacón Theatre in Havana, where Meucci worked as chief engineer and his wife, as costume director. On the Florentine stage, Meucci was already beginning to show his inventive side and devised a kind of acoustic telephone to communicate between the stage the control room, similar to those that were used in ships to speak between the different rooms.īut his participation in political movements would land him in prison for a few months and upon his release he decided to emigrate to Cuba with Ester, who was now his wife. The happy years in HavanaĪt the Pergola Theatre in Florence, the young Antonio Meucci (April 13, 1808, Florence) was able to put into practice his knowledge of engineering, working as a stage technician, and it was there that he met the love of his life, the costume designer Ester Mochi. More than a century later, the US House of Representatives finally recognized his legacy. Meucci died on October 18, 1889, poor and embittered, without ever having succeeded in getting the US courts to agree with him. Antonio Meucci fought until the end of his days to be recognized as telephone’s inventor.
There he developed an invention that would go down in history, the telephone, but economic problems and his difficulty in communicating in English prevented him from being recognized as its inventor, credit for which was attributed to Alexander Graham Bell who was granted a controversial patent. His beginnings as a theatre technician in Florence, Italy and, later, as an engineer at the Tacón Theatre in Havana, Cuba gave no hint of the dramatic turn his life would take when he arrived in the United States. The story of Antonio Meucci could well be depicted on the stage.
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