Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy

Lore & Background

Alexander Graham Bell was a professor of elocution at Boston University and a tutor of deaf children. He began electrical experiments in Scotland in 1867 and, after emigrating to Boston from Canada, pursued research into a harmonic telegraph that could transmit multiple messages over a single wire. Bell formed a partnership with two of his students' parents, including prominent Boston lawyer Gardiner Hubbard, to fund his research. He experimented with many transmitters and receivers from 1872 to 1876, created numerous drawings of liquid transmitters, and obtained a patent in 1875 for a primitive fax machine using liquid transmitters.

Elisha Gray was a prominent inventor in Highland Park, Illinois. His Western Electric company was a major supplier to the telegraph company Western Union. In 1874, Bell was in competition with Gray to be first to invent the practical harmonic telegraph. Gray developed a harmonic telegraph device using vibrating reeds that could transmit musical tones, but not intelligible speech. In December 1874, he demonstrated it to the public at Highland Park First Presbyterian Church.

On February 14, 1876, Gray's lawyer filed a patent caveat with a diagram for a telephone. The same day, Bell's lawyer filed a patent application on the harmonic telegraph, including its use for transmitting vocal sounds. On February 19, the patent office suspended Bell's application for three months to give Gray time to submit a full patent application. Bell's patent was issued on March 7, 1876. Bell finally got his telephone model to work on March 10, when Bell and his assistant Thomas A. Watson recorded the famous 'Watson — come here — I want to see you' story.

Reader's Guide

The controversy centers on whether Bell stole the idea of the telephone from Gray. The theory rests on the similarity between drawings of liquid transmitters in Bell's lab notebook of March 1876 and those of Gray's patent caveat of the previous month. However, there is extensive evidence that Bell had been using liquid transmitters in experiments for over three years before that time, including a patent application in 1875 for a primitive fax machine with drawings of multiple liquid transmitters. The community of electrical inventors was small, and gossip spread quickly. Bell wrote to Hubbard in 1875 urging him to patent the telephone concept and adding 'it might be unwise to let Gray know anything about it.' In 1879, Bell testified that he discussed 'in a general way' Gray's caveat with patent examiner Zenas Fisk Wilber. In an 1886 affidavit, Wilber admitted showing Bell Gray's caveat and receiving a hundred-dollar bill, but his conflicting affidavits discredited him. The affidavit was drawn up by lawyers for the Pan-Electric Telephone Company, which was being sued by Bell Telephone for patent infringement and was under congressional investigation. Bell swore he never gave any money to Wilber and that Wilber did not show him Gray's caveat or any drawing of it.

Did You Know?

• Bell's father, Alexander Melville Bell, developed a system called Visible Speech to transcribe all elements of human speech.
• Bell's 1875 patent for a primitive fax machine included drawings of multiple liquid transmitters, ten months before Gray filed his telephone caveat.
• Patent examiner Zenas Fisk Wilber gave conflicting affidavits about whether he showed Gray's caveat to Bell, which discredited him.
• The Pan-Electric Telephone Company, which used Wilber's affidavit, was being investigated by the U.S. Congress for giving the U.S. Attorney General 500,000 shares of its stock.