ONE OF MY FAVORITE SCENES from The Sopranos, HBO’s hit series about a New Jersey mob boss and his dual “families,” happens in Season 1, Episode 8, shortly after the feds rummage through the Soprano home looking for contraband. Munching on Chinese food with his wife and two kids, Tony grumbles about the FBI officer with an Italian surname: “I mean, what’s he think? He’s gonna make it to the top by arrestin’ his own people? . . . You’d think there never was a Michelangelo, the way they treat people.”
This sparks an ethnic-pride moment involving the whole family. “Did you know that an Italian invented the telephone?” wife Carmela asks son Anthony Junior.
“Alexander Graham Bell was Italian?” he responds.
“Antonio Meucci invented the telephone!” snaps Tony. “And he got robbed! Everybody knows that!”
“Who invented the Mafia?” asks daughter Meadow, with a sly grin. Tony glares at her.
Meanwhile, Anthony Junior has one more query: “Is it true that the Chinese invented spaghetti?”
“Now think about it,” his dad tells him. “Why would people who eat with sticks invent something that you need a fork to eat? And here’s something else I bet you didn’t know: More Italians fought for this country in World War Two than any other ethnic group.”
I was reminded of this scene a few weeks ago when I heard that scientists had unearthed the world’s oldest bowl of noodles. Found in northwest China’s Lajia archaeological site, the thin yellow strands apparently date back some 4,000 years. “Our discovery indicates that noodles were first produced in China,” researcher Houyuan Lu told the BBC.
Thus ends the Great Spaghetti Debate. “Chinese were pasta masters 2,000 years before Italians,” blared a headline in the Times of London.
But at least the Italians–and the Sopranos–still have Antonio Meucci. Well, sort of. In June 2002, Congress passed a resolution crediting Meucci with inventing the telephone and charging Alexander Graham Bell with “fraud and misrepresentation.”
Not everyone was convinced. “To accept Meucci’s claim,” argued an article on Newsweek‘s website, “you have to be part conspiracy theorist, part mad scientist, part Italian-American activist.” The Canadians were especially piqued. Bell, you see, spent part of his life in Brantford, Ontario, and often vacationed in Nova Scotia, where he died and was buried. A 2004 CBC poll ranked him as one of the “top ten greatest Canadians.” In response to the U.S. congressional vote, Ottawa’s House of Commons passed a motion affirming Bell as the telephone’s genuine creator.
I mention this not to take a potshot at Canada’s risible inferiority complex–oops, too late–but to observe the recent spate of revisionist history surrounding inventors. Okay, maybe the trend isn’t all that recent, but for me it is.
Some of these “Who Invented What?” debates can be quite fun. Do we thank Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright for giving us baseball? Did the ice cream cone first emerge at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, or had pushcart vendor Italo Marchiony come up with the idea years earlier? Was Robert Fulton unduly recognized for the steamboat? And who really invented the Internet (besides Al Gore)?
The answer to many such questions is Clintonian: It depends on the definition of “invent.” It may also depend on your heritage. If you’re Scottish, then you know damn well the game of “gowf” was invented at St. Andrews. But if you’re from Holland, you probably have a different opinion.
Indeed, feuds over famous inventions are, like so much in modern life, bound up with the politics of identity. Which also means I’m way out of sync. My own forebears hail from the land of William Wallace, and yet I couldn’t give a flying flagstick whether the Scots or the Dutch were hitting the links first.
But maybe I should. After all, we live in an age when collective self-esteem–that is, self-esteem derived from one’s membership in a particular group–supposedly matters more than personal self-esteem, otherwise known as, er, self-esteem. Maybe I should ask my congressman to propose a measure citing Scotland as the birthplace of golf. And maybe, the next time I feel wronged, I should wrap myself in a saltire and take refuge in the many and diverse accomplishments of the Scots.
I mean, geez, you’d think there never was a Sean Connery, the way they treat people!
-Duncan Currie
