33 Facts About Elisha Gray

Elisha Gray was an American electrical engineer who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company.

Some recent authors have argued that Elisha Gray should be considered the true inventor of the telephone because Alexander Graham Bell allegedly stole the idea of the liquid transmitter from him.

Elisha Gray is considered to be the father of the modern music synthesizer, and was granted over 70 patents for his inventions.

Elisha Gray was one of the founders of Graybar, purchasing a controlling interest in the company shortly after its inception.

Elisha Gray was born in Barnesville, Ohio, the son of Christiana and David Elisha Gray.

Elisha Gray spent several years at Oberlin College where he experimented with electrical devices.

In 1862, while at Oberlin, Elisha Gray met and married Delia Minerva Shepard.

In 1865, Elisha Gray invented a self-adjusting telegraph relay that automatically adapted to varying insulation of the telegraph line.

In 1867 Elisha Gray received a patent for the invention, the first of more than seventy.

Elisha Gray later gave up his administrative position as chief engineer to focus on inventions that could benefit the telegraph industry.

White wanted Elisha Gray to focus on the acoustic telegraph which promised huge profits instead of what appeared to be unpromising competing inventions such as the telephone.

In 1870, Elisha Gray developed a needle annunciator for hotels and another for elevators.

Elisha Gray developed a microphone printer which had a typewriter keyboard and printed messages on paper tape.

In 1874, Elisha Gray retired to do independent research and development.

Elisha Gray applied for a patent on a harmonic telegraph which consisted of multi-tone transmitters, that controlled each tone with a separate telegraph key.

Elisha Gray gave several private demonstrations of this invention in New York and Washington, DC in May and June 1874.

Elisha Gray was a charter member of the Presbyterian Church in Highland Park, Illinois.

At the church, on December 29,1874, Elisha 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.

Elisha Gray built a simple loudspeaker in later models consisting of a vibrating diaphragm in a magnetic field to make the oscillator tones audible and louder at the receiving end.

On July 27,1875, Elisha Gray was granted for "Electric Telegraph for Transmitting Musical Tones".

Elisha Gray was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1878.

On Monday morning February 14,1876, Elisha Gray signed and had notarized the caveat that described a telephone that used a liquid transmitter.

Which application arrived first is hotly disputed, although Elisha Gray believed that his caveat arrived a few hours before Bell's application.

The suspension gave Bell time to amend his claims to avoid an interference with an earlier patent application of Elisha 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.

Elisha Gray stated that he showed the caveat to Bell and Bell gave him $100.

Bell testified that they only discussed the patent in general terms, although in a letter to Elisha Gray, Bell admitted that he learned some of the technical details.

In 1887, Elisha Gray invented the telautograph, a device that could remotely transmit handwriting through telegraph systems.

Elisha Gray was granted several patents for these pioneer fax machines, and the Elisha 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.

Elisha Gray displayed his telautograph invention in 1893 at the 1893 Columbian Exposition and sold his share in the telautograph shortly after that.

Elisha Gray was chairman of the International Congress of Electricians at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.

Elisha Gray conceived of a primitive closed-circuit television system that he called the "telephone".

In 1899, Elisha Gray moved to Boston where he continued inventing.

Three weeks later, on January 21,1901, Elisha Gray died from a heart attack in Newtonville, Massachusetts.