Title: Who really invented the telephone?
Headings: Who Really Invented the Telephone?
Who Really Invented the Telephone?
Content: Having failed on Reis, the German, the opponents of Bell now brought  forward an American inventor named Daniel Drawbaugh, and opened up a noisy newspaper  campaign. To secure public sympathy for Drawbaugh, it was said that he had invented a  complete telephone and switchboard before 1876, but was in such "utter and abject  poverty" that he could not get himself a patent. Five hundred witnesses were  examined; and such a general turmoil was aroused that the Bell lawyers were compelled to  take the attack seriously, and to fight back with every pound of ammunition they  possessed. The fact about Drawbaugh is that he was a  mechanic in a country village near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He was ingenious but not  inventive; and loved to display his mechanical skill before the farmers and villagers. He  was a subscriber to The Scientific American; and it had become the fixed habit of his life  to copy other people's inventions and exhibit them as his own. He was a trailer of  inventors.