History of the telephone sent by Morse on January 6, 1838, across of wiring. Credit for the invention of the electric telephone is frequently disputed, and new controversies over the issue have arisen from time to time. Charles Bourseul, Innocenzo Manzetti, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Alexander Graham Bell, and Elisha Gray, amongst others, have all been credited with the telephone's invention. The early history of the telephone became and still remains a confusing morass of claims and counterclaims, which were not clarified by the huge mass of lawsuits to resolve the patent claims of many individuals and commercial competitors. The Bell and Edison
Invention of the telephone may have made one in 1864, as an enhancement to an automaton built by him in 1849. Charles Bourseul was a French telegraph engineer who proposed (but did not build) the first design of a "make-and-break" telephone in 1854. That is about the same time that Meucci later claimed to have created his first attempt at the telephone in Italy . Bourseul explained: "Suppose that a man speaks near a movable disc sufficiently flexible to lose none of the vibrations of the voice; that this disc alternately makes and breaks the currents from a battery: you may have at a