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
Necessity is the mother of invention our invention." Jowett's translation is noted for injecting flowery, if not florid, language familiar to his Victorian era audience. Jowett himself, in "Plato's Republic: The Greek Text", Vol. III "Notes", 1894, p. 82, gives a literal translation of Plato as "our need will be the real creator," without the proverbial flourish. In an address to the Mathematical Association of England on the importance of education in 1917, Alfred North Whitehead argued that ""the basis of invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity."" and in contrast to the old proverb ""Necessity is the mother