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United States HRes. 269 on Antonio Meucci

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United States HRes. 269 on Antonio Meucci

The 107th United States Congress resolution (HRes 269) of June 11, 2002, recognized the contributions of Antonio Meucci. This was interpreted by some as establishing priority for the invention of the telephone to Meucci. The House of Representatives' resolution did not annul or modify any of Bell's patents for the telephone.

Contents

During the 108th Congress another resolution, SRes 223 was introduced in the United States Senate and died, unenacted.

Shortly afterward, the Canadian government passed a similar motion declaring Alexander Graham Bell the inventor of the telephone. The HRes 269 resolution was widely reported by various news media at the time and is still cited by Meucci advocates as proof that he has been acknowledged as the first inventor of the telephone. The resolution has equally been criticized for its factual errors, inaccuracies, biases and distortions.

Full text of the U.S. House of Representatives Resolution 269

As directly quoted in HRes 269 (Ver. EH), and recorded by the US GPO (table and paragraph numbering added for referencing purposes):

Canadian parliamentary motion

On June 21, 2002, the Canadian House of Commons passed a motion declaring Alexander Graham Bell the inventor of the telephone, in response to the US House resolution.

Critical views on the Motion, Resolution and the Patent Caveat

In 2003, the distinguished Italian telecommunications inventor and Meucci book author Professor Basilio Catania, interviewed on the parliamentary Bell motion and the congressional Meucci resolution, first commented on Bell's record as an inventor and scientist:

I am not the kind of man who can make statements without proofs. I did not do it with Meucci and I do not see why I should do it with Bell... ...I can, however, state that the theoretical description of the electrical transmission of speech in Bell's first patent is nearly perfect and appears to me as the first clear treatise ever written.

Professor Catania later went on to note the straightforwardness of the follow-up parliamentary motion compared to the seaminess of the initial congressional resolution:

The Canadian reaction to an unfortunate passage in Resolution No. 269 of the US House of Representatives is quite understandable. In my opinion the insinuation against the morality and scientific stature of Alexander Graham Bell, in the above resolution, was both unnecessary and unproven, though there had been suspicions that Bell might have fished something from Meucci's ideas. Personally, I would have refrained from stating anything that is not fully proven. I do, however, appreciate that, in the Canadian motion pro Bell, nothing [derogatory] is said against Antonio Meucci...

However, intellectual property law author R. B. Rockman was more critical in his view of HRes 269. After first reviewing the essential details of American Bell Telephone Company v. Globe Telephone Company, Antonio Meucci, et al. (31 Fed 728 (SDNY, 1887)), where he noted major inconsistencies in Meucci's various testimonies, the paucity of direct evidence that both the Globe and Meucci brought forward in support of their defenses and the court's definitive rejection of those defenses in favour of Bell, Rockman then compares the 'Bell v. Globe and Meucci' court decision (of July 19, 1887) with HRes 269:

I conclude that the comments of Mr. Grosvenor [who wrote a memo highly critical of HRes 269 by comparing it with Bell v. Globe] are more likely correct in comparison to the statements [within the preamble of HRes 269] by the United States House of Representatives.

Rockman then proceeded to dissect and parse the U.S. Government's 1887 legal challenge to Bell's telephone patent, which had been brought by United States Attorney General Augustus H. Garland, a major stock shareholder of the Pan-Electric Company which was the instigator of the suit. Pan-Electric sought to overturn Bell's patent in order to compete against the American Bell Telephone Co.

It was this very court challenge that is referenced in HRes 269's preamble, in paragraph No. 9, which inferred an immoral and possibly criminal intent by Bell ("...the Government of the United States moved to annul the patent issued to Bell on the grounds of fraud and misrepresentation"), to which Rockland wrote:

The United States House of Representatives in its resolution of June 11, 2002 states merely that the government of the United States filed the lawsuit, and that the Supreme Court found the complaint viable and remanded the case for trial. The House of Representatives resolution, in my opinion, leaves out many of the salient details [of the Garland-initiated suit], and presents a disjointed and incorrect view of the invention of the telephone.

The same paragraph No. 9 of the Meucci resolution also did not mention that the U.S. Attorney General, plus another cabinet member and two senators had been given or owned millions of dollars of stock in Pan-Electric, as revealed by Joseph Pulitzer in the New York World', a fact which many viewed as a strong incentive for them to try to overturn Bell's patent.

President Grover Cleveland subsequently ordered the Attorney General not to 'pursue the matter' after the court case stalled out. One of several biographies on the controversial Attorney General Augustus Garland's involvement in the 'Government case' noted:

He did, however, suffer scandal involving the patent for the telephone. The Attorney General's office was intervening in a lawsuit attempting to break Bell's monopoly of telephone technology, but it had come out that Garland owned stock in one of the companies that stood to benefit. This congressional investigation received public attention for nearly a year, and caused his work as attorney general to suffer.

The 'Government case' became one of the greatest scandals in Grover Cleveland's presidency, and was ended when Cleveland ordered Garland to discontinue the trial.

Other factual errors were also found within the preamble to the HRes 269 resolution; among them were:

  • Paragraph No. 2 of the resolution referred to Meucci's invention involving "electronic communications", however Meucci's patent caveat described a 'lover's telegraph' which transmitted sound vibrations mechanically across a taut wire, a conclusion that was also noted in Rockman's review ("The court further held that the caveat of Meucci did not describe any elements of an electric speaking telephone...", and "The court held that Meucci's device consisted of a mechanical telephone consisting of a mouthpiece and an earpiece connected by a wire, and that beyond this the invention of Meucci was only imagination.")
  • Paragraphs Nos. 7 & 8 implied that Bell had access to Meucci's works prior to patenting the telephone ("....Meucci later learned that the Western Union affiliate laboratory reportedly lost his working models", followed by: "Alexander Graham Bell, who conducted experiments in the same laboratory where Meucci’s materials had been stored was granted a patent.... with inventing the telephone"). The same inference in the resolution was also described by Rockman. Research by Professor Catania himself showed that Meucci's samples were reportedly lost at a laboratory of American District Telegraph (ADT) of New York, however ADT would not become a subsidiary of Western Union until 1901. Writer and publisher (and Bell's great-great-grandson) Edwin S. Grosvenor also noted that with Bell living and working in the Boston and Brantford areas, and with Meucci living and working in the Staten Island, New York area, there was no overlap where Bell would have had access to Meucci's works prior to Bell's patent application. Grosvenor further pointed out that in 1878, two years after Bell received his patent, the American Bell Telephone Comp., not Bell, was awarded a Western Electric laboratory as part of a patent infringement settlement with the Western Union Telegraph Company. Alexander Graham Bell never worked in that laboratory, and the timing of the transfer made it irrelevant in any event to Bell's patent application of February 1876. Additionally, the American Bell Telephone Company and Western Union were both competitors to each other and did not share facilities both prior to, and subsequent to the patent lawsuit settlement.
  • Paragraph No. 11 stated that "...if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain [his] caveat after 1874, no patent could have been issued to Bell". However Grosvenor noted in a memo that Bell had succeeded in building a telephone based on a sound knowledge and understanding of its principles, whereas Meucci had been found by the court not to have understood the basics of the electric telephone's operation, with that court case having been conducted some time after Bell was awarded his patent. Since Meucci's caveat didn't describe any of the principles of electric telephony, it would therefore have been irrelevant to Bell's application even had the caveat been renewed.

    • In total Grosvenor listed ten errors in detail found within the congressional Meucci resolution, and was highly critical of both its intent and accuracy. He also asked two salient questions in Section "C" of the same report: "1) Should Congress overrule the US courts and its own committee, which looked at evidence extensively, and without reviewing any evidence in the matter?", and "2) Should [the U.S.] Congress pass resolutions on historical facts without checking with legitimate historians or their own library?" The same document also noted that HRes 269 contradicted the findings of its own Congressional committee's investigation, which had, in 1886, produced a report of 1,278 printed pages.

    Grosvenor concluded that: "The historical facts stated in HR 269 were obtained from highly biased sources, and [were] based on shoddy, cursory research."

    References

    United States HRes. 269 on Antonio Meucci Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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