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 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