Telephone’s Inventor: Who was it?

In the historic first call on March 10, 1876, he famously said to his assistant Thomas Watson, “Mr. Watson, come here; I want to see you.”

However, according to Iwan Morus in his book “How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon: The Story of the 19th-Century Innovators Who Forged Our Future” (Icon Books, 2022), inventions usually don’t come from just one person.

“Many — I’d almost say all — nineteenth-century electrical inventions were highly contested, with different inventors claiming credit for having solved the key problems first,” Morus explained to Live Science in an email.

“Charles Wheatstone and William Fothergill Cooke, the co-patentees of the first British electromagnetic telegraph, for example, didn’t take long to fall out over which of them really invented it.

Samuel Morse quarreled with pretty much everyone about his claims to inventing the telegraph. And there were similar debates about the lightbulb, and so on.”

Similarly, according to Christopher Beauchamp, a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School, many individuals besides Bell asserted they invented the telephone. Beauchamp wrote in a 2010 article in the journal Technology and Culture that some even suggested “Bell seized the honor fraudulently.”

“It’s not surprising that Bell’s claims were contested,” Morus added. “There was a lot of money, as well as fame, at stake. However, as a historian, I’m less interested in deciding who really invented something, and more interested in how particular individuals emerged from pack to win credit.”