The Telephone Cases The Telephone Cases The Telephone Cases, 126 U.S. 1 (1888), were a series of U.S. court cases in the 1870s and 1880s related to the invention of the telephone, which culminated in the 1888 decision of the United States Supreme Court upholding the priority of the patents belonging to Alexander Graham Bell. Those telephone patents were relied on by the American Bell Telephone Company and the Bell System—although they had also acquired critical microphone patents from Emile Berliner. The objector (or plaintiff) in the notable Supreme Court case was initially the Western Union telegraph company, which was at the time
Invention of the telephone later introduced by Bell Telephone instead canceled sidetone through a feedback process. An American District Telegraph (ADT) laboratory reportedly lost some of Meucci's working models, his wife reportedly disposed of others and Meucci, who sometimes lived on public assistance, chose not to renew his 1871 "teletrofono" patent caveat after 1874. A resolution was passed by the United States House of Representatives in 2002 that said Meucci did pioneering work on the development of the telephone. The resolution said that "if Meucci had been able to pay the $10 fee to maintain the caveat after 1874, no patent could have been