who is credited for the ivention of the phone

My historcial innovation is the phone.

Ask who really invented the telephone, and you may get the name of a German, Philipp Reis, not Alexander Graham Bell. 

Reis was a 26-year-old science teacher when he began work on the telephone in 1860. His essential idea came from a paper by a French investigator named Bourseul. In 1854 Bourseul had explained how to transmit speech electrically. He wrote:

Speak against one diaphragm and let each vibration "make or break" the electric contact. The electric pulsations thereby produced will set the other diaphragm working, and [it then reproduces] the transmitted sound.

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1098.htm