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
The Heroic Age of American Invention The Heroic Age of American Invention The Heroic Age of American Invention is a 1961 science book for children by L. Sprague de Camp, published by Doubleday. It was reprinted in 1993 by Barnes & Noble under the title "Heroes of American Invention". By "heroic age" the author means the era of American history in which individual initiative and enterprise constituted the primary thread in technical innovation, roughly from the early 19th century until mass production and corporate enterprise outpaced that of the individual around the time of World War I. The story of innovation is told through the biographies