The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) Read Online Free PDF Page A

easily answer the second question. The filing that conflicted with Bell’s telephone patent came from an electrical researcher named Elisha Gray.
     
    TODAY, IF HE is remembered at all, Elisha Gray is known as a technological footnote: the unlucky sap whose patent claim for a telephone arrived just hours after that of Alexander Graham Bell.
    History is harsh in ascribing winners and losers.
    As I soon learned once I started looking, there is a good deal of information to be had about the fight between Bell and Gray over rights to the telephone. The battle dragged on through the courts, in one form or another, for more than a decade. But it is not much remembered today. After all, there is little question about who prevailed in the end.
    Ironically, though, back in 1876, Gray was far better known than Bell. Some twelve years Bell’s senior, Gray was recognized, at least in scientific circles, as one of the leading electrical researchers in the country. He had already received enough money and acclaim for his work to devote himself full time to inventing, and had received many of the roughly seventy patents around the world he would ultimately garner for his inventions—far more than Bell would ever claim.
    Gray was born in 1835 on an Ohio farm; when he was twelve, his father died, plunging the family into poverty. Gray had to quit school to go to work. Despite his lack of formal education, though, he became fascinated by the seemingly magical new possibilities promised by electricity in the mid-1800s. Coupling his fascination with resolve, Gray managed to support himself as a carpenter while completing preparatory school and two further years of study at Oberlin College, near his home. Then, in 1868, at age thirty-three, Gray received his first patent—for an improved telegraph relay. Initially, Gray conducted his electrical experiments in addition to farming. Building upon his patent’s success, however, he soon helped start a firm called Barton & Gray to manufacture telegraphic equipment and he launched a full-time career as a manufacturer and inventor.
    Before long, Western Union, the vast U.S. company that held a near monopoly over the telegraph, recognized the impressive caliber of Gray’s work. In 1872, the company bought a one-third interest in Gray’s firm, making him a wealthy man. Gray’s company changed its name to Western Electric, moved to Chicago, and soon became the leading developer and supplier of equipment to Western Union.
    By 1876, the quality of Western Electric’s products was universally admired in the emerging field. For instance, Bell’s assistant Thomas Watson vividly recalls how he and the others in the Charles Williams machine shop (where Watson crafted Bell’s telegraph inventions) looked upon Gray’s work with at least a tinge of envy:
    Gray was electrician for the Western Electric Company of Chicago, the largest manufacturer of electrical machinery in the country at that time. His shop had better tools and did finer work than Williams’. Whenever a piece of Western Electric machinery came into our shop for repairs, the beauty of its design and the quality of its workmanship made it an object of admiration to all of us, and made most of Williams’ instruments look crude.
     
    In the case of the telephone, I learned, Gray had filed what the Patent Office then called a “caveat.” Although the government subsequently dropped the option by 1910, a caveat issued by the U.S. Patent Office provided an inventor up to a year with an exclusive right to turn his or her idea into a working, patentable invention. In those days an inventor who had conceived of a device but had yet to build it could use a caveat to warn away would-be competitors. Once it was granted, a caveat afforded all the same rights as a patent during the provisional year while the applicant worked to complete the invention in question. Gray’s caveat described an “instrument for transmitting and receiving vocal sounds