Elisha Gray was an American electrical engineer and co-founder of what became the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. He filed a patent caveat describing a telephone-like device on February 14, 1876, the same day Alexander Graham Bell's own telephone patent application reached the United States Patent Office, a coincidence that made him Bell's principal rival in the resulting decades of litigation over who invented the telephone first.
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Filed a competing telephone patent caveat on the same day as Bell.
In Field
Source A History of TechnologyCharles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors
Held Differently
The Telephone, Inventions Why this is disputed. Gray's February 14, 1876 caveat described a similar voice-transmission method filed the same day as Bell's application; the United States Patent Office and later courts upheld Bell's patent, but the question of who reached the idea first has never been settled to universal satisfaction.
Source Technology: A World HistoryDaniel R. Headrick
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. A History of Technology
Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, A. R. Hall and Trevor I. Williams, editors, Oxford University Press, 1954View the Source Technology: A World History
Elisha Gray (Wikipedia)
In Group: Telecommunications and Radio Engineers, lead paragraph: telecom/radio/television invention or advance stated in own articleView the Source Reader Challenges (0)
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