American’s Hidden History is a continuing series by Ron Stouffer about the people and events in American History that you weren’t taught in school.

Who invented the telephone? To get this question correct on our teacher’s test we all answered Alexander Graham Bell. But the history of this invention, like lots of history, appears more complicated.

Two miles from where I grew up and attended grades K-12, on Harrisburg’s West Shore near Camp Hill and Highland Park, in a hamlet known as Eberly’s Mills, stands a PA Historical Marker with the following text: “Daniel Drawbaugh Inventor of a telephone for which he sought a patent in 1880. Claims contested by Bell Telephone, which won the court decision in 1888. Born in this village, July 14, 1827, where he developed his inventions; he removed in 1904 to Camp Hill, where he died Nov. 2, 1911.”

The website waymarks/WMMBG says Drawbaugh invented the telephone before Bell even had the idea. Other accounts on the web indicate the invention may have been made even earlier by an Italian immigrant, Antonio Meucci. And then there is Elisha Gray who filed for a patent for a telephone prototype in Highland Park, Illinois on Feb. 14, 1876. Depending on who you believe, Bell filed two hours earlier or a few hours later. A court case followed in which Bell prevailed.

One just wishes that when the official version of history is visited upon us by the textbook companies and our professors and teachers that after stating that “Bell invented the telephone,” one more explanatory sentence or two might be added, even parenthetically, stating that other inventors, such as Daniel Drawbaugh of PA, were simultaneously developing the telephone, but that Bell gets the credit due to winning a court case over the patent.

As for me, I vote for the hometown hero. At a time when corporations were attaining significant power and maturity and would acquire
corporate “personhood” in the 1886 US Supreme Court case, Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Corporation, I suppose Daniel Drawbaugh had little chance of beating the corporate- backed Bell in court. So, don’t ask me who invented the telephone, on a test or otherwise, because my answer is Daniel Drawbaugh. That’s my story (history,) and I’m sticking to it.