The Original Telephone: The Bizarre Musical Language Of Jean-François Sudre

image credit

There's a famous dispute over who invented the telephone. Was it Alexander Graham Bell? Or perhaps Elisha Grey or Philipp Reis? And no discussion of 19th century inventors would be complete without Thomas Edison.

But before all of them was the little-known French musician and inventor Jean-François Sudre. His invention may have little in common with a modern electronic telephone, but Sudre is nevertheless credited with coining the word telephone and attaching it to a remarkable system he devised for transmitting messages in the early 1800s.