LOWELL, MASS. : In the 1820s and 1830s the mills of Lowell were at the vanguard of America’s industrial revolution. Once the nation’s leading manufacturer of cotton cloth, Lowell declined after World War I; the mills closed one by one as the textile industry moved south. By the 1970s Lowell was a blighted, stagnant community, an industrial ghost town with a proud past but an uncertain future.

Since then, however, Lowell has enjoyed a vigorous renaissance. A $200 million revitalization program has preserved and restored much of Lowell’s industrial heritage and attracted a number of high-technology firms and service companies to the area.

Another new arrival to Lowell is the Paul E. Tsongas Industrial History Center, a joint venture of the Lowell National Historical Park and the University of Lowell’s College of Education. Edward Pershey, the center’s director, believes that industrial history is American history. Since its founding in 1987 the center has conducted several highly successful “History Factories,” workshops designed to help teachers integrate industrial history into elementary, middle, and high school classes.

The workshops, however, are only a beginning. The center is located in downtown Lowell at the site of the Boott Cotton Mills on the Merrimack River. In the summer of 1991 Lowell National Historical Park will unveil a huge exhibit at the restored Boott Mill No. 6, featuring a hundred working power looms. And that fall the Tsongas Center will open to the public with an ambitious new facility, which Pershey describes as “part museum, part school.”

The facility will include a display where groups of students can learn about mechanized production by building their own assembly lines out of modular components. Pershey notes that museum exhibits have tended to emphasize the repetitive aspects of assembly-line production; this one will reveal a creative aspect as well, in the overall design of the production sequence.

In the nineteenth century Lowell’s mills harnessed the power of the Merrimack River to drive their machinery. In the center’s Water Power Experimental Room visitors will be challenged to design and build (in miniature) their own working canal systems, complete with locks, gates, water wheels, and turbines. Those willing to risk getting wet will be able to test their systems with real running water.

A design laboratory will allow visitors to design simple products, using both traditional drafting equipment and computer-aided design, while in the Loom Room they can learn firsthand about textile manufacturing and how the role of the worker changed during the transition from craft-based production to mechanization. A Role Playing Theater will engage groups in an exploration of a broad range of historical topics, from the lives of the “mill girls” of the 1820s and 1830s to the experiences of the immigrant workers and the decline of the Lowell mills in the mid-twentieth century.

“I’m excited about it,” says Pershey. “It’s quite unlike anything in the country. It’s, well, nifty.”

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. : Prominent members of Staten Island’s ItalianAmerican community gathered last October to honor Antonio Meucci on the centennial of his death. When I received an invitation to attend, I had to confess to not knowing just who Antonio Meucci was. Meucci, I was told, invented the first telephone in 1849, when Alexander Graham Bell was a toddler in Scotland.

Meucci would probably have been forgotten by history had he not given refuge to the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1850. After Meucci’s death in 1889 his house was preserved as a memorial to Garibaldi, and in 1956 it was rededicated as the Garibaldi Meucci Museum. Amid the displays of Garibaldi relics are two wooden replicas of what Meucci called a speaking telegraph, or telettrofono .

Textbooks tell us that Bell was the first to transmit speech by an electric current, in Boston in 1876, but virtually every technological breakthrough produces rival claims of inventive priority, and the telephone is no exception. Unquestionably Meucci invented something in 1849. But whether it was a true electric telephone or not depends on who you talk to.

Meucci’s story was told at the gathering by Marco Nese, the co-author of a new biography of Meucci. According to Nese, Meucci was a gifted inventor hindered by ill luck, an utter lack of business acumen, and either an inability or an unwillingness to learn English. In 1835 Meucci left Italy for Cuba, where he worked as a scenic designer and stage technician. In his spare time Meucci tinkered with inventions. He developed a new process for galvanizing metals, making a small fortune, which he lost on a project to transform human cadavers into statues.

He also experimented with the use of electricity as a means of curing illness. In one case he placed a copper plate, attached to wires, into a patient’s mouth. When Meucci closed the circuit, the patient, unsurprisingly, cried out in pain; what was surprising, however, was that Meucci distinctly heard the cry over the wire.

Meucci began to experiment with the apparatus in an effort to develop a practical telephone. The following year he and his wife emigrated to the United States, where he continued to experiment while earning a modest living manufacturing candles. In 1871 Meucci was severely burned in a ferryboat boiler explosion. While he recuperated, his wife sold his laboratory equipment and telettrofono prototypes to a junk dealer.

Distraught but undaunted, Meucci looked into securing a patent for his invention. He couldn’t afford to prepare a patent application, so he instead filed a caveat, a kind of temporary patent. He then tried to interest the American District Telegraph Company, a Western Union affiliate, in his device. The company’s vice-president, Edward B. Grant, was polite but noncommittal. Meucci left some drawings and a pasteboard model telettrofono with Grant; they were eventually lost.

In 1874 a frustrated Meucci was unable to muster the twenty dollars needed to renew his caveat for another year. Two years later Bell submitted his application to the U.S. Patent Office, followed mere hours later by his rival Elrsha Gray. Both inventors had had dealings with Western Union while they were doing research into multiple telegraphy. Did Western Union pirate Meucci’s work and share it with Bell and Gray? Nese didn’t say as much, but he marshaled his facts to strongly suggest the possibility.

A more orthodox view of what happened is expressed by Elliot Sivowitch, a museum specialist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “You can draw the details together to make it look like Meucci was swindled out of recognition for inventing the telephone,” says Sivowitch, “but the development from the telegraph to the telephone is too well documented. I don’t think the evidence is there at all.”

Meucci supporters point to his 1871 caveat as evidence, but the caveat’s description of the device is ambiguous. “It’s not at all clear just what kind of instrument he had invented,” says Sivowitch.

In a widely publicized patent case in the 1880s, the Globe Telephone Company used Meucci’s work as ammunition in an all-out assault on the Bell Telephone monopoly. Bell’s lawyers contended that Meucci’s telettrofono was not a true electric telephone, in which sounds were first converted into a modulated current, then reconstituted as sounds by a vibrating diaphragm. They insisted that Meucci’s device was merely an acoustic telephone, transmitting sound through the vibrations of a taut wire; it was, in effect, merely a more sophisticated version of the tin-can-and-string telephone used by children.

The Globe company lost the suit, and with that defeat went Meucci’s last chance to receive the recognition, and the financial rewards, due the inventor of the telephone. He died nearly penniless. Still, Antonio Meucci is widely celebrated in his homeland as the true father of the telephone, as is Philipp Reis in Germany.

Meucci had other inventions, including a marine telegraph and a process for making carbonated fruit beverages. But wealth and fame managed to elude him.

SACRAMENTO, CALIF. : Last October’s meeting of the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) had a decidedly international cast, with a healthy contingent of foreign scholars from countries including Norway, Iceland, Germany, Great Britain, and Sweden. Some highlights: John R. White, the Smithsonian’s eminent railroad historian, delivered an eloquent and surprisingly affecting tribute to railroad boxcars, while old high tech met new high tech when Robert Friedel of the University of Maryland and Steven Lubar of the Smithsonian both presented computer programs that enable users, through text and graphics, to explore the workings of the machines of the Industrial Revolution.

At the SHOT awards banquet University of Pennsylvania scholars dominated the evening, netting four of the six awards. The Penn winners included Judith McGaw, whose book Most Wonderful Machine: Mechanization and Social Change in Berkshire Papermaking, 1801-1885 (Princeton, 1987) shared the Dexter Prize for the best new book in the field with the anthropologist Anthony F. C. Wallace’s St. Clair: A Nineteenth-Century Coal Town’s Experience with a Disaster-Prone Industry (Knopf, 1987). SHOT’s highest honor, the Leonardo da Vinci medal for lifetime achievement in the field, went to R. Angus Buchanan of the University of Bath in Great Britain, one of the founders of the field of industrial archaeology. Finally, the president of SHOT, Merritt Roe Smith, announced that the the National Science Foundation had awarded SHOT a $350,000 grant to develop curriculum materials for teaching the history of technology to high school and middle school students.