Alexander Graham Bell’s Lesser-Known Rival
… and Why It Pays to Document Your Research
Elisha Gray
By Paul Niemann
Alexander Graham Bell gets credit for inventing the telephone. But did you know there was another person who tried to patent a different version of the telephone on the very same day as Bell in 1876?
Born in Ohio in 1835, he was a physics professor at nearby Oberlin College and was a renowned inventor of the musical telegraph.
Little is known about him because, in what has to be one of the biggest cases of being “a day late and a dollar short,” he arrived at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office two hours after Bell arrived to apply for a patent for his version of the telephone.
His name is Elisha Gray. As a result of arriving after Bell, most of the world has never heard of him.
What happened?
U.S. patent law states that the first one to invent a new product is the rightful owner of the patent rights to that product, regardless of who applies for a patent first. Adequate records are necessary whenever there is a dispute. Because Bell applied for his patent first, he was initially awarded the patent.
Gray delayed the issuance of Bell’s patent through a legal hearing. However, he failed to keep adequate records of his design. Gray lost any possible rights. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld Bell’s right to the patent. The rest, as they say, is history.
The basis of Gray’s legal action was that Bell had filed for his patent before he had a working model of his telephone. But the Supreme Court ruled that a person can prove that an invention is complete and ready for patenting even before a working model has been produced.
Gray was not the only one to lay claim to inventing the telephone. Daniel Drawbaugh, who was born near Harrisburg, Penn., said he invented the telephone long before Bell filed a patent application in 1875. Drawbaugh didn’t have any papers or records to prove his claim, though, and the Supreme Court rejected his assertion four votes to three.
Bell, on the other hand, had kept excellent records.
Gray did go on to invent other products, such as the facsimile telegraph system that he patented in 1888. Bell, who was born in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1847, became a U.S. citizen in 1882. He went on to become one of the co-founders of the National Geographic Society and he served as its president from 1896 to 1904.
Gray, however, has been forgotten by much of the world.
Was Bell’s telephone greeted with enthusiasm by everyone at the time?
As is the case with many new inventions, there were those who rejected the telephone for one reason or another. Even President Rutherford B. Hayes was skeptical of the new device when Bell demonstrated it to him at the White House in 1876.
There was also a well-known “investor” who had an opportunity to invest in the telephone directly with Bell, but he rejected the opportunity.
According to his writings, he was a big fan of new inventions, but since he had previously invested in several that had failed, he turned down a chance to invest in the telephone. Who was he?
None other than Mark Twain.
Editor’s note: This article appears in the December 2010 print edition.
Paul Niemann is the author of the Invention Mysteries book series. He’s also produced history DVDs for consumers, schools and libraries. He’s a former marketing and entrepreneurship instructor at Quincy (Ill.) University. Fun fact: A born right-hander, Paul has been ambidextrous since he was 4, when his left-handed dad gave him his left-handed baseball glove. Paul returns to Inventors Digest after a lengthy hiatus to share some little known facts about our inventing Founding Fathers. Visit www.PaulNiemann.com
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