Between an Angel’s Cry and a Murmur: The Invention of the Telephone in Colonial Havana

Abstract

In 1849 in an electroplating factory on second floor Havana's Teatro Tacon, city's home for Italian opera, theater engineer Antonio Meucci placed a piece copper in a patient's mouth and shocked him. The patient, who was an opera house employee of color, was hoping to be cured what he described as head rheumatism. He cried out in pain as voltage contacted his tongue.1 Meucci thought he heard something and repeated experiment. This time a murmur-an inarticulate sound was carried down wire to adjacent room where Meucci was administering shocks, and Italian inventor grasped basic workings telephony, some thirty years before Alexander Bell.2Meucci is kind character who seems more proper to a novel than to history. A Florentine inventor and engineer for Pergola Opera, he moved to Havana in 1835, where he became machinist for Teatro Principal and then Teatro Tacon, opulent theaters owned by Catalan merchant and infamous slaver Francisco Marty y Torrents. In 1850 a year after discovering principles behind telephone, Meucci and his wife Ester Mochi moved from Havana to a home on Staten Island that they shared for some time with Italian unification leader Giuseppe Garibaldi. From sizable wealth in Cuba couple descended into poverty in New York, worsened by Meucci's severe burns from an exploding boiler aboard Staten Island Ferry (the 1871 Westfield Disaster); Meucci's wife sold his plans for telettrofono-named for speaking at a long distance-while he was recuperating.3 Three years later Meucci's plans for his invention, which he had registered with District Telephone Company, were, he was told, but may well have been slipped into a competitor's hands. A month later Bell requested a patent for his telephone, and in 1885 Meucci lost a suit against Bell's American Telephone Company for primacy invention. Meucci died poor in 1889.Many aspects Meucci's life and his inventions have been detailed in an amateur biography by Italian communications engineer Basilio Catania. Catania's biography does not discuss, however, how accidental discovery telephony ought to be situated in relation to both Cuban aesthetics at time-specifically island's flourishing Italian opera scene, which Meucci was an instrumental part-and island's harshest period in its history racialized slavery. One might, for instance, be tempted to read Meucci's shock treatment as part a history ongoing experiments on and torture black bodies in Cuba during a period severe corporal punishment and just five years after Conspiracy la Escalera, or Ladder Conspiracy (1844). The conspiracy was a coordinated antislavery insurrection that yielded revolts on a swath plantations throughout country. Its eventual suppression ended in killing many members island's black bourgeoisie; name owed to manner in which accused were tied to ladders and whipped. Yet freethinker Meucci intended to heal man he shocked and, himself in flight from conservative politicians in Italy opposed to his and Ester's progressive politics, was likely also critical Cuba's colonial slave state.Similarly, one might easily connect Meucci's pioneering work on transmitting human voice to his work on opera house technologies. Besides inventing an acoustic (nonelectronic) to communicate between stage and backstage in Italy, he created a fan system to clear dangerous smoke generated by candles lighting theater.4 Avital Ronell, who does not mention Meucci in her study The Telephone Book, argued that the possibility telephone was always linked to music, noting that Bell's other competitor Elisha Gray had been fiddling with a musical telephone in 1870s.5 But here too a possible association might be too easy. In Meucci's case it may be that and operatic voice share more philosophically than they do technologically: Meucci was experimenting with electricity because he was interested in its use in opera staging and in medicine, but-the fortuitous setting aside-he was not explicidy looking to capture operatic voice. …