“In science, credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not the man to whom the idea first occurs,” the historian and academic Francis Galton once wrote. Galton might have also included technological invention, when discoveries and patents are often disputed, with the inventors themselves and their home countries having vested interest in claiming credit. So it is with the invention of the telephone, for a century attributed to Alexander Graham Bell until it no longer was.

On this day, June 11, in 2002, the United States House of Representatives voted to acknowledge Antonio Meucci as the rightful inventor of the telephone.

History records that Meucci created one of the earliest primitive short-distance systems in his native Italy, before moving to Staten Island, New York to further his work on his invention. He connected a room in his home to a nearby workshop, and debuted his system to the locals. But Meucci did not have sufficient command of English to interest anyone else in his work, and struggled to find financial backing. He did not even have enough for a long-term patent; but a little while later Alexander Graham Bell, who shared a lab with Meucci, filed one for himself.