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

2014; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.13110/discourse.36.3.0340

1522-5321

Rachel Price,

Cuban History and Society

Between an Angel's Cry and a Murmur: The Invention of the Telephone in Colonial Havana Rachel Price (bio) In 1849 in an electroplating factory on the second floor of Havana's Teatro Tacón, the city's home for Italian opera, theater engineer Antonio Meucci placed a piece of copper in a patient's mouth and shocked him. The patient, who was an opera house employee "of color," was hoping to be cured of what he described as head rheumatism. He cried out in pain as the voltage contacted his tongue.1 Meucci thought he heard something and repeated the experiment. This time a "murmur—an inarticulate sound" was carried down the wire to the adjacent room where Meucci was administering the shocks, and the Italian inventor grasped the basic workings of telephony, some thirty years before Alexander Bell.2 Meucci is the kind of character who seems more proper to a novel than to history. A Florentine inventor and engineer for the Pérgola Opera, he moved to Havana in 1835, where he became the machinist for the Teatro Principal and then the Teatro Tacón, opulent theaters owned by the Catalan merchant and infamous slaver Francisco Marty y Torrents. In 1850 a year after discovering the principles behind the telephone, Meucci and his wife Ester Mochi moved from Havana to a home on Staten Island that they shared for some time with the Italian unification leader Giuseppe Garibaldi. [End Page 340] From sizable wealth in Cuba the couple descended into poverty in New York, worsened by Meucci's severe burns from an exploding boiler aboard the Staten Island Ferry (the 1871 Westfield Disaster); Meucci's wife sold his plans for the 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 the District Telephone Company, were, he was told, "lost" 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 of the invention. Meucci died poor in 1889. Many aspects of 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 the accidental discovery of telephony ought to be situated in relation to both Cuban aesthetics at the time—specifically the island's flourishing Italian opera scene, of which Meucci was an instrumental part—and the island's harshest period in its history of racialized slavery. One might, for instance, be tempted to read Meucci's shock treatment as part of a history of ongoing experiments on and torture of black bodies in Cuba during a period of severe corporal punishment and just five years after the Conspiracy of la Escalera, or Ladder Conspiracy (1844). The conspiracy was a coordinated antislavery insurrection that yielded revolts on a swath of plantations throughout the country. Its eventual suppression ended in the killing of many members of the island's black bourgeoisie; the name owed to the manner in which the accused were tied to ladders and whipped. Yet the freethinker Meucci intended to heal the man he shocked and, himself in flight from conservative politicians in Italy opposed to his and Ester's progressive politics, was likely also critical of Cuba's colonial slave state. Similarly, one might easily connect Meucci's pioneering work on transmitting the human voice to his work on opera house technologies. Besides inventing an acoustic (nonelectronic) telephone to communicate between stage and backstage in Italy, he created a fan system to clear the dangerous smoke generated by the candles lighting the theater.4 Avital Ronell, who does not mention Meucci in her study The Telephone Book, argued that "the possibility of the telephone" was always linked to music, noting that Bell's other competitor Elisha Gray had been fiddling with a "musical telephone" in the 1870s.5 But here too a possible association might be too easy. In Meucci's case it may be that the telephone and the operatic voice share more philosophically...