Elisha Gray
Elisha Gray | |
---|---|
Born | Barnesville, Ohio, U.S. | August 2, 1835
Died | January 21, 1901 Newtonville, Massachusetts, U.S. | (aged 65)
Occupation | Engineer/Inventor |
Awards | Elliott Cresson Medal (1897) |
Signature | |
Elisha Gray (August 2, 1835 – January 21, 1901) was an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. Gray is best known for his development of a telephone prototype in 1876 in Highland Park, Illinois. Some recent authors have argued that Gray should be considered the true inventor of the telephone because Alexander Graham Bell allegedly stole the idea of the liquid transmitter from him.[1] Although Gray had been using liquid transmitters in his telephone experiments for more than two years previously, Bell's telephone patent was upheld in numerous court decisions.
Gray is also considered to be the father of the modern music synthesizer,[2] and was granted over 70 patents for his inventions.[3] He was one of the founders of Graybar, purchasing a controlling interest in the company shortly after its inception.
Biography and early inventions
Gray was born in
In 1862, while at Oberlin, Gray met and married Delia Minerva Shepard.
In 1865, Gray invented a self-adjusting
In 1869, Elisha Gray and his partner Enos M. Barton founded Gray & Barton Co. in Cleveland, Ohio to supply telegraph equipment to the giant
In 1870, financing for Gray & Barton Co. was arranged by General Anson Stager, a superintendent of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Stager became an active partner in Gray & Barton Co. and remained on the board of directors. The company moved to Chicago near Highland Park. Gray later gave up his administrative position as chief engineer to focus on inventions that could benefit the telegraph industry. Gray's inventions and patent costs were financed by a dentist, Dr. Samuel S. White of Philadelphia, who had made a fortune producing porcelain teeth. White wanted Gray to focus on the acoustic telegraph which promised huge profits instead of what appeared to be unpromising competing inventions such as the telephone. White made the decision in 1876 to redirect Gray's interest in the telephone.
In 1870, Gray developed a needle annunciator for hotels and another for elevators.[6] He also developed a microphone printer which had a typewriter keyboard and printed messages on paper tape.[7]
In 1871 the Great Chicago Fire destroyed the city and its telegraph infrastructure, Gray & Barton was hired to rebuild it.[8] In 1872, Western Union, then financed by the Vanderbilts and J. P. Morgan, bought one-third of Gray and Barton Co. and changed the name to Western Electric Manufacturing Company of Chicago. Gray continued to invent for Western Electric.
In 1874, Gray retired to do independent research and development. Gray applied for a patent on a harmonic telegraph which consisted of multi-tone transmitters, that controlled each tone with a separate telegraph key. Gray gave several private demonstrations of this invention in New York and Washington, D.C. in May and June 1874.
Gray was a charter member of the Presbyterian Church in Highland Park, Illinois. At the church, on December 29, 1874, Gray gave the first public demonstration of his invention for transmitting musical tones and transmitted "familiar melodies through telegraph wire" according to a newspaper announcement. This was one of the earliest
On July 27, 1875, Gray was granted U.S. patent 166,095 for "Electric Telegraph for Transmitting Musical Tones" (acoustic telegraphy). His experiments with transmitting musical tones went further, and on February 15, 1876 Elisha Grey was granted US Patent for electro-harmonic telegraph with piano keyboard.[9][10]
He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1878.[11]
On July 31, 1888, Gray patented the
Telephone
Because of Samuel White's[13] opposition to Gray working on the telephone, Gray did not tell anybody about his invention for transmitting voice sounds until February 11, 1876 (Friday). The only remaining proof is a drawing he made on that day.[14] Gray requested that his patent lawyer William D. Baldwin prepare a "caveat" for filing at the US Patent Office. A caveat was like a provisional patent application with drawings and description but without a request for examination.
On Monday morning February 14, 1876, Gray signed and had notarized the caveat that described a telephone that used a liquid transmitter. Baldwin then submitted the caveat to the US Patent Office. That same morning a lawyer for Alexander Graham Bell submitted Bell's patent application. Which application arrived first is hotly disputed, although Gray believed that his caveat arrived a few hours before Bell's application.[15] Bell's lawyers in Washington, DC, had been waiting with Bell's patent application for months, under instructions not to file it in the USA until it had been filed in Britain first. (At the time, Britain would only issue patents on discoveries not previously patented elsewhere.)
According to Evenson, during the weekend of February 12–14, 1876, before either caveat or application had been filed in the patent office, Bell's lawyer learned about the liquid transmitter idea in Gray's caveat that would be filed early Monday morning February 14.[15] Bell's lawyer then added seven sentences describing the liquid transmitter and a variable resistance claim to Bell's draft application. After the lawyer's clerk recopied the draft as a finished patent application, Bell's lawyer hand-delivered the finished application to the patent office just before noon Monday, a few hours after Gray's caveat was delivered by Gray's lawyer. Bell's lawyer requested that Bell's application be immediately recorded and hand-delivered to the examiner on Monday so that later Bell could claim it had arrived first. Bell was in Boston at this time and was not aware that his application had been filed.[16]
Five days later, on February 19, Zenas Fisk Wilber, the patent examiner for both Bell's application and Gray's caveat, noticed that Bell's application claimed the same variable resistance feature described in Gray's caveat. Wilber suspended Bell's application for 90 days to give Gray time to submit a competing patent application. The suspension also gave Bell time to amend his claims to avoid an interference with an earlier patent application of Gray's that mentioned changing the intensity of the electric current without breaking the circuit, which seemed to the examiner to be an "undulatory current" that Bell was claiming. Such an interference would delay Bell's application until Bell submitted proof, under the
Bell's lawyer telegraphed Bell, who was still in Boston, to come to Washington, DC. When Bell arrived on February 26, Bell visited his lawyers and then visited examiner Wilber who told Bell that Gray's caveat showed a liquid transmitter and asked Bell for proof that the liquid transmitter idea (described in Bell's patent application as using mercury as the liquid) was invented by Bell. Bell pointed to an application of Bell's filed a year earlier where mercury was used in a circuit breaker. The examiner accepted this argument, although mercury would not have worked in a telephone transmitter. On February 29, Bell's lawyer submitted an amendment to Bell's claims that distinguished them from Gray's caveat and Gray's earlier application.[18][19] On March 3, Wilber approved Bell's application and on March 7, 1876, 174,465 was published by the U.S. Patent Office.[20]
Bell returned to Boston and resumed work on March 9, drawing a diagram in his lab notebook of a water transmitter being used face down, very similar to that shown in Gray's caveat.[21] Bell and Watson built and tested a liquid transmitter design on March 10 and successfully transmitted clear speech saying "Mr. Watson – come here – I want to see you." Bell's notebooks became public when they were donated to the Library of Congress in 1976.[22]
Although Bell has been accused of stealing the telephone from Gray[23] because his liquid transmitter design resembled Gray's, documents in the Library of Congress indicate that Bell had been using liquid transmitters extensively for three years in his multiple telegraph and other experiments. In April, 1875, ten months before the alleged theft of Gray's design, the U.S. Patent Office granted 161,739 to Bell for a primitive fax machine, which he called the "autograph telegraph." The patent drawing includes liquid transmitters.[24]
After March 1876, Bell and Watson focused on improving the electromagnetic telephone and never used Gray's liquid transmitter in public demonstrations or commercial use.[25]
Although Gray had abandoned his caveat, Gray applied for a patent for the same invention in late 1877. This put him in a second interference with Bell's patents. The
In 1886, Wilber stated in an
Bell's patent was disputed in 1888 by attorney Lysander Hill who accused Wilber of allowing Bell or his lawyer Pollok to add a handwritten margin note of seven sentences to Bell's application that describe an alternate design similar to Gray's liquid microphone design.[28] However, the marginal note was added only to Bell's earlier draft, not to his patent application that shows the seven sentences already present in a paragraph. Bell testified that he added those seven sentences in the margin of an earlier draft of his application "almost at the last moment before sending it off to Washington" to his lawyers. Bell or his lawyer could not have added the seven sentences to the application after it was filed in the Patent Office, because then the application would not have been suspended.[29]
Further inventions
In 1887, Gray invented the telautograph, a device that could remotely transmit handwriting through telegraph systems. Gray was granted several patents for these pioneer fax machines, and the Gray National Telautograph Company was chartered in 1888 and continued in business as The Telautograph Corporation for many years; after a series of mergers it was finally absorbed by Xerox in the 1990s. Gray's telautograph machines were used by banks for signing documents at a distance and by the military for sending written commands during gun tests when the deafening noise from the guns made spoken orders on the telephone impractical. The machines were also used at train stations for schedule changes.[30][31]
Gray displayed his telautograph invention in 1893 at the
Gray conceived of a primitive closed-circuit television system that he called the "telephone". Pictures would be focused on an array of selenium cells and signals from the selenium cells would be transmitted to a distant station on separate wires. At the receiving end, each wire would open or close a shutter to recreate the image.
In 1899, Gray moved to Boston where he continued inventing. One of his projects was to develop an underwater signaling device to transmit messages to ships. One such signaling device was tested on December 31, 1900. Three weeks later, on January 21, 1901, Gray died from a heart attack in Newtonville, Massachusetts.
Some modern authors[32][33][34] incorrectly[35] credit Elisha Gray as the namesake of the Gray code, which is actually named after 20th century physicist and electrical researcher Frank Gray.
Publications
Gray wrote several books including:
- Experimental Researches in Electro-Harmonic Telegraphy and Telephony, 1867–1876 (Appleton, 1878)
- Telegraphy and Telephony (1878)
- Electricity and Magnetism (1900) and
- Nature's Miracles (1900) a nontechnical discussion of science and technology for the general public.
See also
References
- ^ Shulman 2008.
- ^ "What is a Synthesizer and how does it work? |". Playpiano.com. 2009-02-10. Retrieved 2013-09-02.
- ^ "Elisha Gray". Oberlin.edu. Retrieved 2013-09-02.
- ^ "Elisha Gray: The Early Years - Graybar 150 years". Archived from the original on 2019-08-09. Retrieved 2019-08-09.
- ^ "US Patent № 69,424. Telegraph Relay Instrument. Patented Oct 1, 1867" (PDF).
- ^ "US Patent № 118231, «Improvement in electro-magnetic annunciators», dated August, 22, 1871" (PDF).
- ^ "US Patent № 132907 «Improvement in printing-telegraph instruments», dated November, 12, 1872" (PDF).
- ^ "The Graybar story" (PDF).
- ^ "US Patent № 173,618. Improvement in electro-harmonic telegraphs. Patented Feb. 15, 1876" (PDF).
- ^ Иванов Александр. "Элиша Грей (Elisha Gray)". Музей Истории Телефона.
- ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2021-05-10.
- ISBN 0-471-20505-2.
- ^ Dr. Samuel S. White of Philadelphia was a wealthy dentist who paid the legal costs and shared in any profits from Elisha Gray's inventions.
- ^ Baker 2000, pp. 33–35.
- ^ a b Evenson 2000, pp. 68–69.
- ^ Shulman 2008, pp. 71.
- ^ Evenson 2000, pp. 80–81.
- ^ Evenson 2000, pp. 81–82.
- ^ Baker 2000, pp. A43–A44.
- ^ US 174465, "Improvement in telegraphy", issued 7/3/1876
- ^ Shulman 2008, pp. 36–37.
- ^ "Alexander Graham Bell family papers". LOC.gov. Library of Congress. Archived from the original on 2013-02-16.
- ^ Shulman 2008, p. 211.
- ^ US 161739, "Improvement in transmitters and receivers for electric telegraphs", issued 6/4/1875
- ^ Evenson 2000, p. 100.
- ^ Baker 2000, pp. 90–91.
- ^ Evenson 2000, pp. 167–171.
- ^ Evenson 2000, pp. 92, 180.
- ^ Evenson 2000, pp. 73–74.
- ^ Delano, Jack (1943). "Chicago, Illinois. Reading the teleautograph in the trainmaster's office of the Union Station. The messages originate in the interlocking tower and are carried to teleautographs in various parts of the station; the trainmaster's office, the passenger agent's office, information desk, etc". www.loc.gov. Retrieved 2022-08-06.
- ^ Armstrong, Walter J. (1921). "Mechanical and Electrical Equipment of the Toronto Union Station, Journal of the Engineering Institute of Canada, Vol. 4; pages 87-97". www.trainweb.org. Retrieved 2022-08-06.
- . Retrieved 2020-06-22.
- SBN 444-19747-8. (2+448+2 pages)
- ISBN 0-8018-7434-3.
- Knuth, Donald Ervin (2004-10-15). "Generating all n-tuples". The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4A: Enumeration and Backtracking. Vol. pre-fascicle 2a. Archived from the originalon 2006-12-09. Retrieved 2018-01-14.
Further reading
- Shulman, Seth (2008). ISBN 978-0-393-06206-9.
- Evenson, A. Edward (2000). The Telephone Patent Conspiracy of 1876: The Elisha Gray - Alexander Bell Controversy. North Carolina: McFarland. ISBN 0-7864-0883-9.
- Baker, Burton H. (2000). The Gray Matter: The Forgotten Story of the Telephone. St. Joseph, Mi.: Telepress. ISBN 0-615-11329-X.
- Coe, Lewis (1995). The Telephone and Its Several Inventors. North Carolina: McFarland Publishers. ISBN 0-7864-0138-9.
- Patterson, Boyd Crumrine (January 1969). "The Story of Elisha Gray". Western Pennsylvania History. 52 (1): 29–41. Archived from the original on 2012-12-12.
- Dr. Lloyd W. Taylor, an Oberlin physics department head, began writing a Gray biography, but the book was never finished because of Taylor's accidental death in July 1948. Dr Taylor's unfinished manuscript is in the College Archives at Oberlin College.
External links
This article's use of external links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. (February 2022) |
- Works by Elisha Gray at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Elisha Gray at Internet Archive
- Works by Elisha Gray at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 12 (11th ed.). 1911. pp. 390–391. .
- Gray's telephone caveat filed on February 14, 1876 same day as Bell's application
- Gray's telephone caveat with drawings, filed on February 14, 1876
- Gray's "Musical Telegraph" of 1876
- Gray's "Harmonic Multiple Telegraph"
- Bell–Gray conflict at the Wayback Machine (archived October 4, 1999) over the harmonic telegraph
- "Telautograph" description
- Grave of Elish Gray in Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago
- The Musical Telegraph Elisha Grey's The Musical Telegraph on '120 Years of Electronic Music'