The Telephone Cases were a series of U.S. court cases in the 1870s and 1880s related to the invention of the telephone, which culminated in the 1888 decision of the United States Supreme Court upholding the priority of the patents belonging to Alexander Graham Bell. Those telephone patents were relied on by the American Bell Telephone Company and the Bell System –although they had also acquired critical microphone patents from Emile Berliner.

The objector (or plaintiff) in the notable Supreme Court case was initially the Western Union telegraph company, which was at the time a far larger and better financed competitor than American Bell Telephone. Western Union advocated several more recent patent claims of Daniel Drawbaugh, Elisha Gray, Antonio Meucci and Philip Reis in a bid to invalidate Alexander Graham Bell's master and subsidiary telephone patents dating back to March 1876. Had Western Union succeeded it would have immediately destroyed the Bell Telephone Company and then Western Union stood to become the world's largest telecommunications monopoly in Bell's place.

Peter Case (born April 5, 1954) is an American singer-songwriter and guitarist, who has had a wide-ranging career ranging from new wave music to folk rock to solo acoustic performance.

Case was born in Buffalo, New York and lived in nearby Hamburg. A veteran of several rock bands and the local bar scene as a teenager, Case dropped out of high school when he was fifteen (he would later earn a GED), and after several years of traveling arrived in 1973 in San Francisco, where he performed as a street musician. During this period a documentary about the local music scene, Nightshift, directed by Bert Deivert, captured the young Case on film. In 1976, he teamed up with Jack Lee and Paul Collins in to form the early new wave band The Nerves in San Francisco. The group's 1976 single, "Hanging on the Telephone", was later recorded by Blondie.

When the Nerves disbanded, Case moved to Los Angeles and formed the pop-rock band The Plimsouls in 1980. The Plimsouls found a measure of success when their songs "A Million Miles Away," "The Oldest Story in the World," and "Play the Breaks" were featured in the movie Valley Girl, but by that time the group had already broken up. Case briefly toured with Gurf Morlix, Victoria Williams (Case's first wife), and Warren Tornado Klein as the Incredibly Strung Out Band, but their collaboration never resulted in a record.

Antonio Santi Giuseppe Meucci (Italian: [anˈtɔːnjo meˈuttʃi]; 1808–1889) was an Italian-American inventor and a friend of the revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi. He was best known for developing a voice communication apparatus which several sources credit as the first telephone.

Meucci set up a form of voice communication link in his Staten Island home that connected its second floor bedroom to his laboratory. He submitted a patent caveat for his telephonic device to the U.S. Patent Office in 1871, but there was no mention of electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound in his caveat. In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell was granted a patent for the electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound by undulatory electric current.

Meucci was born at Via dei Serragli 44 in the San Frediano borough of Florence,Grand Duchy of Tuscany, (now in the Italian Republic), on 13 April 1808, as the first of nine children to Amatis and Domenica Meucci. Amatis was an officer of the local police and his mother was principally a homemaker. Four of Meucci's siblings did not survive childhood.