“The vote by the House of Representatives prompted joyous claims in Meucci’s homeland that finally Bell had been outed as a perfidious Scot who found fortune and fame by stealing another man’s work.

“Calling the Italian’s career extraordinary and tragic, the resolution said his “teletrofono”, demonstrated in New York in 1860, made him the inventor of the telephone in the place of Bell, who had access to Meucci’s materials and who took out a patent 16 years later.”