Antonio Meuchy invented the telephone.

You probably knew that.

The paperwork is clear.

He was a poor inventor with barely enough money to apply for the first patent.

His wife, Elsa, pawned all of his materials, and it took him years to finally find enough stuff to send Western

Union hoping they would adopt his new technology. Finally, he gave up heartbroken.

And it was his lab mate, Alexander Graham Bell,

who ended up with all the profits and all the fame.

Hey, it's Seth, and this is a Kimbo. So if Alexander Graham Bell didn't invent the telephone and he didn't. What did he invent? Well he invented the Bell system.

The Bell system was the forebarer of the Universal Telephone Network that we all take for granted.

That you can pick up the phone and call anywhere in the world and the same system will connect you to that person at the other end.

Shortly after Bell had patented the stolen telephone invention, he had a problem.

The problem was it was too difficult for one man or one organization to wire the entire United States and the world

for telephone service.

At one point, there were 6,000 phone companies in the United States.

And it was impossible to pick up a phone in New York and call California. And part of the magic of the Bell system, which

evolved over the course of decades, was interoperability. And this is a podcast about the magic of interoperability and the

risks that all of us face when it's not there. How did Rockefeller get so rich, the richest man in history?

Well, it's not something that's going to make him a poster boy for good behavior. What he did was gather together some

competitors and make it so they were big enough to do a deal with the railroads so that they would get rebates when they shipped their

oil from one place to another.

With those deals in hand, he went to new competitors.

...