Editing Alexander Graham Bell (section)

===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.{{Sfn|MacLeod|1999|p=19}} Over 18 years, the Bell Telephone Company faced 587 court challenges to its patents, including five that went to the [[Supreme Court of the United States|U.S. Supreme Court]],<ref name="ATCS">{{cite web |title=Who Really Invented The Telephone? |website=Australasian Telephone Collecting Society |url=http://www.telephonecollecting.org/invent.htm |location=Moorebank, NSW, Australia |access-date=April 22, 2011 |archive-date=September 24, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150924114048/http://www.telephonecollecting.org/invent.htm |url-status=dead }}</ref> but none was successful in establishing priority over Bell's original patent,{{sfn|Groundwater|2005|p=95}}<ref>{{cite book |last=Black |first=Harry |title=Canadian Scientists and Inventors: Biographies of People who made a Difference |url=https://archive.org/details/canadianscientis0000blac |url-access=registration |location=Markham, Ontario |publisher=Pembroke |date=1997 |page=[https://archive.org/details/canadianscientis0000blac/page/19 19] |isbn=978-1-55138-081-0 }}</ref> and the Bell Telephone Company never lost a case that had proceeded to a final trial stage.{{sfn|Groundwater|2005|p=95}} Bell's laboratory notes and family letters were the key to establishing a long lineage to his experiments.{{sfn|Groundwater|2005|p=95}} 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.{{sfn|Mackay|1997|p=179}}

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.<ref>{{cite web |url=https://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-supreme-court/167/224.html |title=US v. American Bell Tel Co (1897) |date=May 10, 1897 |website=Findlaw |access-date=July 28, 2010}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://supreme.justia.com/us/128/315/case.html |title=United States V. American Bell Telephone Co., 128 U.S. 315 (1888) |website=Jusrtia US Supreme Court |date=November 12, 1885 |access-date=July 28, 2010}}</ref> 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 [[stare decisis|precedent]]. With a change in administration and charges of conflict of interest (on both sides) arising from the original trial, the [[United States Attorney General|U.S. attorney general]] dropped the lawsuit on November 30, 1897, leaving several issues undecided [[Merit (legal)|on the merits]].<ref>{{cite journal |title=The United States Government vs. Alexander Graham Bell. An important acknowledgment for Antonio Meucci |journal=[[Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society]] |volume=22 |issue=6 |pages=426–442 |date=December 2002 |doi=10.1177/0270467602238886 |last1=Catania |first1=Basilio|s2cid=144185363 }}</ref>

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,{{refn|Meucci was not involved in the final trial.{{clarify|date=June 2018|reason=What final trial is this talking about?}}|group=N}} 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 [[ADT Security Services|American District Telegraph]] (ADT) of New York, which was incorporated as a subsidiary of Western Union in 1901.<ref name="Catania">{{cite web |last=Catania |first=Basilio |url=http://www.chezbasilio.org/meucci_faq.htm#25 |title=Antonio Meucci – Questions and Answers: What did Meucci to bring his invention to the public? |website=Chezbasilio.org |date=November 6, 2009 |access-date=September 19, 2015}}</ref><ref name="ADT">{{cite web |url=http://www.adt.com/about-adt/history |title=Our History |website=ADT |access-date=September 18, 2015}}</ref> 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.{{sfn|Bruce|1990|pp=271–272}} 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".<ref name="guardian.co.uk">{{cite news |author=Rory Carroll |title=Bell did not invent telephone, US rules |url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jun/17/humanities.internationaleducationnews |work=The Guardian|date=June 17, 2002|access-date=October 25, 2015}}</ref><ref>[http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107 "H.RES.269: Resolution 269."] ''thomas.loc.gov.'' Retrieved: July 28, 2010. {{webarchive |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150713175614/http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c107 |date=July 13, 2015 }}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.chezbasilio.it/us_congr_rec.htm |title=Congressional Record – Speech by Prof. Basillio |date=September 5, 2001 |archive-date=July 17, 2011 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20110717032953/http://www.chezbasilio.it/us_congr_rec.htm |access-date=September 18, 2015}}</ref> This did not put an end to the still contentious issue.<ref>{{cite web |title=Antonio Meucci (1808–1889) |website=Italian Historical Society of America |url=http://www.italianhistorical.org/page42.html |access-date=September 18, 2015 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20151015195124/http://www.italianhistorical.org/page42.html |archive-date=October 15, 2015 |url-status=dead }}</ref> Some modern scholars do not agree that Bell's work on the telephone was influenced by Meucci's inventions.<ref name=Bellis>{{cite web |first=Mary |last=Bellis |url=http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bl_Antonio_Meucci.htm |title=The History of the Telephone – Antonio Meucci |website=About.com Inventors |access-date=December 29, 2009 |archive-date=May 28, 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200528235654/https://www.thoughtco.com/antonio-meucci-4071768 |url-status=dead }}</ref>{{refn|Tomas Farley also writes that "Nearly every scholar agrees that Bell and Watson were the first to transmit intelligible speech by electrical means. Others transmitted a sound or a click or a buzz but our boys [Bell and Watson] were the first to transmit speech one could understand."<ref name=Bellis/>|group=N}}

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.{{sfn|Mackay|1997|p=178}} 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.<ref>{{multiref2|{{Cite book |last=Parker |first=Steve |title=Alexander Graham Bell and the Telephone |series=(Science Discoveries) |date=1995 |page=23 |url=https://archive.org/details/alexandergrahamb00park/page/23 |url-access=registration |isbn=978-0-7910-3004-2 | oclc=1024162541|publisher=Chelsea House}}|
{{Cite journal|date=June 1910
|journal=Scientific American |volume=102 |issue=23 |title=Alexander Graham Bell and the Telephone |page=462
|bibcode=1910SciAm.102..462. |doi=10.1038/scientificamerican06041910-462 }}}}</ref>{{refn| Many of the lawsuits became rancorous, with Elisha Gray becoming particularly bitter over Bell's ascendancy in the telephone debate, but Bell refused to launch a countersuit for libel.{{citation needed|date=February 2020}}|group=N}}

{{Further|The Telephone Cases}}