A D V E N T U R E S in C Y B E R S O U N DElisha Gray : 1835 - 1901
Elisha Gray (b. Aug. 2, 1835, Barnesville, Ohio, U.S. d. Jan. 21, 1901, Newtonville, Mass.), U.S. inventor and contestant with Alexander Graham Bell in a famous legal battle over the invention of the telephone. Gray invented a number of telegraphic devices and in 1869 was one of two partners who founded what became Western Electric Company. On Feb. 14, 1876, the day that Bell filed an application for a patent for a telephone, Gray applied for a caveat announcing his intention to file a claim for a patent for the same invention within three months. When Bell first transmitted the sound of a human voice over a wire, he used a liquid transmitter of the microphone type previously developed by Gray and unlike any described in Bell's patent applications to that date, and an electromagnetic metal-diaphragm receiver of the kind built and publicly used by Gray several months earlier. In the legal cases that followed, the claims of Gray and Bell came into direct conflict, and Bell was awarded the patent. In 1880 Gray became professor of dynamic electricity at Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio.
Elisha Gray would have been known to us as the inventor of the telephone if Alexander Graham Bell hadn't got to the patent office one hour before him. Instead, he goes down in history as the accidental creator of one of the first electronic musical instruments - a chance by-product of his telephone technology. In 1876 Gray accidentally dicovered that he could control sound from a self vibrating electromagnetic circuit and in doing so invented a basic single note oscillator. The 'Musical Telegraph' used steel reeds whose oscillations were created and transmitted , over a telephone line, by electromagnets. Gray also built a simple loudspeaker device in later models consisting of a vibrating diaphragm in a magnetic field to make the oscillator audible.
Elisha Gray (1835-1901) developed a microphone almost at the same time. He patented his microphone system two hours after Bell got his patent so he was not the first one. He used a metal bar that was connected to a membrane on one side and dipped into a liquid on the other end. Bell who had already founded the Bell Telephone Company took both patents and used his invention. This company delivered and installed 50000 telephones within the first three years and was soon the world's largest telephone company known as American Telephone and Telegraph Company. One year after the invention five bank houses in Boston ordered one of Bell's telephone systems. This system revealed certain shortcomings. His telephone was better receiving than transmitting. The microphone was not sensitive enough. This was improved by David E. Hughes' (1831-1900) invention of the carbon microphone (1878) which was more sensitive. In 1880 in the USA the telephone net had already 50 000 subcribers. The development of the Telephone In ALL higher industrialized countries the telephone became very popular and common. The speed of this development slowed down only during wars or economic crisis. In the following years telephony became more and more technical. When somebody wanted to give somebody else a call he or she had to talk to an operator first who built up the connection manually on a connecting board. This took a long time because each individual telephone subscriber had to have his own socket that had to be connected and disconnected by hand those two wanted to talk to each other. This way of manual exchange was the only way of making telephone calls until in 1889 Almon B. Strowger invented a system that allowed each individual telephone subscriber to establish their own telephone connections. The telephone sets got dialers. This development made people more independent because they could dial themselves to establish their telephone connections. In 1892 Strowger founded his Strowger Automatic Telephone Exchange Company which was the first telephone exchange without operators to establish connections. At the same time people had the wish to see the people they were talking to. Until this wish could be turned into reality it took almost hundred years as we know today.
Elisha Gray ...contested the invention of the telephone with Alexander Graham Bell. He was born in Barnesville, Ohio, on Aug. 2, 1835, and was brought up on a farm. He had to leave school early because of the death of his father, but later completed preparatory school and two years at Oberlin College while supporting himself as a carpenter. At college he became fascinated by electricity, and in 1867 he received a patent for an improved telegraph relay. During the rest of his life he was granted patents on about 70 other inventions, including the telautograph (1888), an electrical device for reproducing writing at a distance. On Feb. 14, 1876, Gray filed with the U.S. Patent Office a caveat (an announcement of an invention he expected soon to patent) describing apparatus 'for transmitting vocal sounds telegraphically.' Unknown to Gray, Bell had only two hours earlier applied for an actual patent on an apparatus to accomplish the same end. It was later discovered, however, that the apparatus described in Gray's caveat would have worked, while that in Bell's patent would not have. After years of litigation, Bell was legally named the inventor of the telephone, although to many the question of who should be credited with the invention remained debatable. In 1872, Gray founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, parent firm of the present Western Electric Company. Two years later he retired to continue independent research and invention and to teach at Oberlin College. He died in Newtonville, Mass., on Jan. 21, 1901."
Elisha Gray was a hard working professional inventor with some success to his credit. Born in 1835 in Barnesville, Ohio, Gray was well educated for his time, having worked his way through three years at Oberlin College. His first telegraph related patent came in 1868. An expert electrician, he co-founded Gray and Barton, makers of telegraph equipment. The Western Union Telegraph Company, then funded by the Vanderbilts and J.P. Morgan, bought a one-third interest in Gray and Barton in 1872. They then changed its name to the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, with Gray remaining an important person in the company. To Gray, transmitting speech was an interesting goal but not one of a lifetime.
Distinguished American electrician Elisha Gray was born at Barnesville in Belmont county, Ohio, on August 2, 1835. His family were Quakers, and in early life he was apprenticed to a carpenter, but showed a taste for chemistry, and at the age of twenty-one he went to Oberlin College, where he studied for five years. At the age of thirty he turned his attention to electricity, and invented a relay which adapted itself to the varying insulation of the telegraph line. He was then led to devise several forms of automatic repeaters, but they are not much employed. In 1870-2, he brought out a needle annunciator for hotels, and another for elevators, which had a large sale. His 'Private Telegraph Line Printer' was also a success. From 1873-5 he was engaged in perfecting his 'Electro-harmonic telegraph.' His speaking telegraph was likewise the outcome of these researches. The 'Telautograph,' or telegraph which writes the messages as a fac-simile of the sender's penmanship by an ingenious application of intermittent currents, is the latest of his more important works. Mr. Gray is a member of the firm of Messrs. Gray and Barton, and electrician to the Western Electric Manufacturing Company of Chicago. His home is at Highland Park near that city. also... The marvellous development of telegraphy within the last generation has called into existence a great variety of receiving instruments, each admirable in its way. The Hughes, or the Stock Exchange instruments, for instance, print the message in Roman characters; the sounders strike it out on stops or bells of different tone; the needle instruments indicate it by oscillations of their needles; the Morse daubs it in ink on paper, or embosses it by a hard style; while Bain's electro-chemical receiver stains it on chemically prepared paper. The Meyer-Baudot and the Quadruple receive four messages at once and record them separately; while the harmonic telegraph of Elisha Gray can receive as many as eight simultaneously, by means of notes excited by the current in eight separate tuning forks. also... In 1860 Philipp Reis, produced a telephone which could transmit musical notes, and even a lisping word or two; and some ten years later Mr. Cromwell Fleetwood Varley, F.R.S., a well-known English electrician, patented a number of ingenious devices for applying the musical telephone to transmit messages by dividing the notes into short or long signals, after the Morse code, which could be interpreted by the ear or by the eye in causing them to mark a moving paper. These inventions were not put in practice; but four years afterwards Herr Paul la Cour, a Danish inventor, experimented with a similar appliance on a line of telegraph between Copenhagen and Fredericia in Jutland. In this a vibrating tuning-fork interrupted the current, which, after traversing the line, passed through an electro-magnet, and attracted the limbs of another fork, making it strike a note like the transmitting fork. By breaking up the note at the sending station with a signalling key, the message was heard as a series of long and short hums. Moreover, the hums were made to record themselves on paper by turning the electro-magnetic receiver into a relay, which actuated a Morse printer by means of a local battery. Mr. Elisha Gray, of Chicago, also devised a tone telegraph of this kind about the same time as Herr La Cour. In this apparatus a vibrating steel tongue interrupted the current, which at the other end of the line passed through the electro-magnet and vibrated a band or tongue of iron near its poles. Gray's 'harmonic telegraph,' with the vibrating tongues or reeds, was afterwards introduced on the lines of the Western Union Telegraph Company in America. As more than one set of vibrations--that is to say, more than one note--can be sent over the same wire simultaneously, it is utilised as a 'multiplex' or many-ply telegraph, conveying several messages through the same wire at once; and these can either be interpreted by the sound, or the marks drawn on a ribbon of travelling paper by a Morse recorder. Gray also invented a 'physiological receiver,' which has a curious history. Early in 1874 his nephew was playing with a small induction coil, and, having connected one end of the secondary circuit to the zinc lining of a bath, which was dry, he was holding the other end in his left hand. While he rubbed the zinc with his right hand Gray noticed that a sound proceeded from it, which had the pitch and quality of the note emitted by the vibrating contact or electrotome of the coil. 'I immediately took the electrode in my hand,' he writes, 'and, repeating the operation, found to my astonishment that by rubbing hard and rapidly I could make a much louder sound than the electrotome. I then changed the pitch of the vibration, and found that the pitch of the sound under my hand was also changed, agreeing with that of the vibration.' Gray lost no time in applying this chance discovery by designing the physiological receiver, which consists of a sounding-box having a zinc face and mounted on an axle, so that it can be revolved by a handle. One wire of the circuit is connected to the revolving zinc, and the other wire is connected to the finger which rubs on the zinc. The sounds are quite distinct, and would seem to be produced by a microphonic action between the skin and the metal. All these apparatus follow in the track of Reis and Bourseul--that is to say, the interruption of the current by a vibrating contact. also... Bell patented his speaking telephone in the United States at the beginning of 1876, and by a strange coincidence, Mr. Elisha Gray applied on the same day for another patent of a similar kind. Gray's transmitter is supposed to have been suggested by the very old device known as the 'lovers' telephone,' in which two diaphragms are joined by a taut string, and in speaking against one the voice is conveyed through the string, solely by mechanical vibration, to the other. Gray employed electricity, and varied the strength of the current in conformity with the voice by causing the diaphragm in vibrating to dip a metal probe attached to its centre more or less deep into a well of conducting liquid in circuit with the line. As the current passed from the probe through the liquid to the line a greater or less thickness of liquid intervened as the probe vibrated up and down, and thus the strength of the current was regulated by the resistance offered to the passage of the current. His receiver was an electro-magnet having an iron plate as an armature capable of vibrating under the attractions of the varying current. But Gray allowed his idea to slumber, whereas Bell continued to perfect his apparatus. However, when Bell achieved an unmistakable success, Gray brought a suit against him, which resulted in a compromise, one public company acquiring both patents.
also see...Gray's Telephone Patent
Back to the Top | Scientists and Engineers G - M | Quit | eMail: Dr Russell Naughton |