History of the telephone patents, however, were commercially decisive, because they dominated telephone technology and were upheld by court decisions in the United States. The modern telephone is the result of work of many people. Alexander Graham Bell was, however, the first to patent the telephone, as an "apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically". Bell has most often been credited as the inventor of the first practical telephone. However, in Germany Johann Philipp Reis is seen as a leading telephone pioneer who stopped only just short of a successful device, and as well the Italian-American inventor and businessman Antonio Meucci has been
Necessity is the mother of invention inuentour of all goodnesse", in his book "Toxophilus". In 1608, George Chapman, in his two-part play "The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron", used a very similar phrase: "The great Mother, Of all productions (graue Necessity)". But, the earliest actual usage of the proverb "Necessity is the mother of invention" is sometimes ascribed to Richard Franck, who used it in his book "Northern Memoirs", calculated for the meridian of Scotland (1658). Commonly misattributed due to Benjamin Jowett's popular idiomatic translation (1871) of "Plato's Republic", Book II, 369c as "The true creator is necessity, who is the mother of