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Intellectual Property Disputes; Nothing Changes!
M
arch 7th was the 135th anniversary of the United States Patent Office award, to Alexander Graham Bell of his much disputed US Patent 174,465 “Improvement in Telegraphy,” which was the first patent for the telephone. Bell’s valuable patent became the subject of controversy and litigation, and as such is an appropriate subject for our article in this edition of Subtel Forum, given its Legal & Finance theme. Contrary to what most of us were taught in school, Bell did not invent the telephone. There is significant doubt as to whether he was entitled to the US patent he received, or that he was the author of the liquid transmitter idea that made the invention practical.
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Frenchman Charles Bourseul wrote an 1854 memorandum that was first published in the Paris magazine L’Illustration concerning the transmission of the human voice by electrical current.
by Stewart Ash & Kaori Shikinaka
Bourseul explained: “Suppose that a man speaks near a movable disc sufficiently flexible to lose none of the vibrations of the voice; that this disc alternately makes and breaks the currents from a battery: you may have at a distance another disc which will simultaneously execute the same vibrations.... It is certain that, in a more or less distant future, speech will be transmitted by electricity. I have made experiments in this direction; they are delicate and demand time and patience, but the approximations obtained promise a favourable result.” Although this clearly described the necessary principles of a telephone, Bourseul did not go on to produce a working apparatus. It is now widely accepted that in the same year, Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci invented the first successful electrical device for the communication of speech. In 1860, a German, Johann Philipp Reis made a device that could transmit musical notes as well as indistinct speech and, on occasions, distinct speech. The first
sentence spoken using it was reported to be “Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat” (the horse doesn’t eat cucumber salad). It is thought that this was the first device to actually be called a telephone. Clearly, any of these men have better claims to the invention of the telephone than Bell, but whether he was entitled to a patent as the inventor of a workable design is another matter entirely. In 1871, Meucci set up an electrical voice communication system between the basement and the first floor of his Staten Island home, and shortly afterwards submitted a “patent caveat” to the US Patents Office in Washington D.C. A patent caveat (discontinued in 1909) was an instrument set up under the US Patents Act of 1836, which was similar to a patent application. It was required to contain a description and drawing of an invention, but no claim. It was effectively a notice of intention to submit a patent application at a later date. The filing fee was much less for a caveat than a full application, and the