Answer

Children learn that the Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876. But the real inventor was Antonio Meucci, a poor Italian American. He shared a workshop with Bell in the 1860s, and made a ‘talking telegraph’ for his wife who was ill in bed, so that she could call him when she wanted something. But Meucci never took his idea to the US Patent Office, because he was too poor to pay the $250 that he needed. So on February 14th 1867 Alexander Graham Bell took the invention to the Patent Office instead. Just two hours later another inventor, Elisha Gray arrived with the same idea – too late!

At that time, nobody believed that the telephone was an important invention. Bell’s father-in-law, also a scientist, described the invention as ‘a beautiful toy’. And it wasn’t before 2002 that the US Congress decided that Meucci was the true inventor of the telephone.

But everyone knows that the Italian Marconi invented the radio, right? Wrong. Actually, Guglielmo Marconi stole his great idea from Nikola Tesla, a Croatian scientist. Tesla wrote an article in 1893 and in it he described his important new invention – the radio.

But just two years later, Marconi took the idea to the US Patent Office and soon began to sell it. In 1909 he even won a Nobel Prize for his invention.

In 1943 Nikola Tesla died in New York, a poor man. That year, the US Congress decided that Nikola Tesla was the ‘true father of the radio’.