Alexander Graham Bell
Competitors

As is sometimes common in scientific discoveries, simultaneous developments occurred, as evidenced by a number of inventors who were at work on the telephone. Over 18 years, the Bell Telephone Company faced 587 court challenges to its patents, including five that went to the U.S. Supreme Court, but none was successful in establishing priority over Bell's original patent, and the Bell Telephone Company never lost a case that had proceeded to a final trial stage. Bell's laboratory notes and family letters were the key to establishing a long lineage to his experiments. The Bell company lawyers successfully fought off myriad lawsuits generated initially around the challenges by Elisha Gray and Amos Dolbear. In personal correspondence to Bell, both Gray and Dolbear had acknowledged his prior work, which considerably weakened their later claims.

On January 13, 1887, the U.S. government moved to annul the patent issued to Bell on the grounds of fraud and misrepresentation. After a series of decisions and reversals, the Bell company won a decision in the Supreme Court, though a couple of the original claims from the lower court cases were left undecided. By the time the trial had wound its way through nine years of legal battles, the U.S. prosecuting attorney had died and the two Bell patents (No. 174,465, dated March 7, 1876, and No. 186,787, dated January 30, 1877) were no longer in effect, although the presiding judges agreed to continue the proceedings due to the case's importance as a precedent. With a change in administration and charges of conflict of interest (on both sides) arising from the original trial, the U.S. attorney general dropped the lawsuit on November 30, 1897, leaving several issues undecided on the merits.

During a deposition filed for the 1887 trial, Italian inventor Antonio Meucci also claimed to have created the first working model of a telephone in Italy in 1834. In 1886, in the first of three cases in which he was involved, Meucci took the stand as a witness in hope of establishing his invention's priority. Meucci's testimony was disputed due to lack of material evidence for his inventions, as his working models were purportedly lost at the laboratory of American District Telegraph (ADT) of New York, which was incorporated as a subsidiary of Western Union in 1901. Meucci's work, like that of many other inventors of the period, was based on earlier acoustic principles and, despite evidence of earlier experiments, the final case involving Meucci was eventually dropped upon Meucci's death. But due to the efforts of Congressman Vito Fossella, on June 11, 2002, the U.S. House of Representatives stated that Meucci's "work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged". This did not put an end to the still contentious issue. Some modern scholars do not agree that Bell's work on the telephone was influenced by Meucci's inventions.

The value of Bell's patent was acknowledged throughout the world, and patent applications were made in most major countries. When Bell delayed the German patent application, the electrical firm Siemens & Halske set up a rival manufacturer of Bell telephones under its own patent. Siemens produced near-identical copies of the Bell telephone without having to pay royalties. The establishment of the International Bell Telephone Company in Brussels, Belgium, in 1880, as well as a series of agreements in other countries eventually consolidated a global telephone operation. The strain put on Bell by his constant appearances in court, necessitated by the legal battles, eventually resulted in his resignation from the company.
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