Elisha Gray
Encyclopedia
Elisha Gray 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
and is considered by some writers to be the true inventor of the variable resistance telephone, despite losing out to Alexander Graham Bell
for the telephone patent
.
Gray is also considered to be the father of the modern music synthesizer
, and was awarded over 70 patents for his inventions.
, Gray was brought up on a farm. He spent several years at Oberlin College
where he experimented with electrical devices. Although Gray was not a graduate of Oberlin College, he taught electricity and science at Oberlin and built laboratory equipment for Oberlin science departments.
In 1862 while at Oberlin, Gray met and married Delia Minerva Shepard.
In 1865 Gray invented a self-adjusting telegraph relay that automatically adapted to varying insulation of the telegraph line.
In 1867 Gray received a patent for the self-adjusting telegraph relay and in later years he received patents for more than 70 other inventions.
In 1869, Elisha Gray and his partner Enos M. Barton founded Gray & Barton Co. in Cleveland, Ohio to supply telegraph equipment to the giant Western Union Telegraph Company. The electrical distribution business was later spun off from Western Electric and organized into a separate company, Graybar Electric Company
, Inc.. Barton had been employed by Western Union
to examine and test new products.
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., which moved to Chicago. Gray moved from Ohio to Highland Park
near Chicago and remained on the board of directors. But he 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 to the exclusion of what appeared to be unpromising competing inventions such as the telephone. It was White's decision in 1876 to abandon Gray's caveat for the telephone.
In 1870, Gray developed a needle annunciator for hotels and another for elevators. He also developed a telegraph printer which had a typewriter keyboard and printed messages on paper tape.
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, each tone being controlled by 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 electric musical instrument
using self vibrating electromagnetic circuits that were single-note oscillators operated by a two-octave piano keyboard. The "Musical Telegraph" used steel reeds whose oscillations were created by electromagnets and transmitted over a telegraph wire. Gray also 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. In 1900 Gray was working on an underwater signaling device. After his death in 1901 officers were investigating his house, who then gave the invention to Oberlin College and some of the students tested it out. After a few years of testing he was recognized as the inventor of the underwater signaling device.
On July 27, 1875, Gray was granted patent 166,096 for "Electric Telegraph for Transmitting Musical Tones" (acoustic telegraphy
).
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 microphone. 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. 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. 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 on Monday, a few hours after Gray's caveat was delivered to the patent office 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 in the US patent office.
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 first to invent rules, that Bell had invented that feature before Gray.
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 over Gray's caveat and Gray's earlier application. On March 3, Wilber approved Bell's application and on March 7, 1876 patent 174,465 was published by the U.S. Patent Office
.
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 and very similar to that shown in Gray's caveat." Bell and Watson built and tested Gray's water transmitter design on March 10 and successfully transmitted clear speech saying "Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you." Bell's notebooks did not become public until the 1990s.
The importance of Bell's test of Gray's water transmitter idea was it proved that clear speech could be transmitted electrically. It was a scientific experiment, not development of a commercial product. Prior to that, Bell had only an unproven theory.
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 Patent Office determined "while Gray was undoubtedly the first to conceive of and disclose the [variable resistance] invention, as in his caveat of 14 February 1876, his failure to take any action amounting to completion until others had demonstrated the utility of the invention deprives him of the right to have it considered." Gray challenged Bell's patent anyway, and after two years of litigation, Bell was awarded rights to the invention, and as a result, Bell is credited as the inventor.
In 1886, the patent examiner (Zenas Fisk Wilber) stated in a sworn affidavit that he was an alcoholic and deeply in debt to Bell's lawyer Marcellus Bailey
with whom Wilber had served in the Civil War. Wilber stated that, contrary to Patent Office rules, he showed Bailey the caveat Gray had filed. Wilber also 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 Gray, Bell admitted that he learned some of the technical details.
Bell's patent was also disputed in 1888 by attorney Lysander Hill who accused Wilber of allowing Bell or his lawyer Pollok to add a handwritten margin note of 7 sentences to Bell's application that describe an alternate design similar to Gray's liquid microphone design. However, the marginal note was added only to Bell's earlier draft, not as a marginal addition to his patent application that shows the 7 sentences already present in a paragraph in Bell's patent application when it was filed in the Patent Office on February 14, 1876. Bell testified that he added those 7 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 7 sentences to the application after it was filed in the Patent Office, because then there would not have been any 90 day suspension of Bell's application on February 19.
Although Bell was accused, and is still accused, of stealing the telephone from Gray, Bell used Gray's water transmitter design only after Bell's patent was granted and only as a proof of concept
scientific experiment to prove to his own satisfaction that intelligible "articulate speech" (Bell's words) could be electrically transmitted. Bell's assistant Thomas Watson testified that he tested all of the competing designs. 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. When Bell demonstrated his telephone at the Centennial Exhibition in June 1876, he used his improved electromagnetic transmitter, not Gray's water transmitter.
", 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 charted 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.
Gray displayed his telautograph invention in 1893 at the 1893 Columbian Exposition and sold his share in the telautograph shortly after that. Gray was also chairman of the International Congress of Electricians at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.
Gray conceived of a primitive closed-circuit television
system that he called the "telephote". 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
.
As of 2006 no book-length biography has been written about the life of Elisha Gray. An Oberlin
physics department head named Dr. Lloyd W. Taylor 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.
Electrical engineering
Electrical engineering is a field of engineering that generally deals with the study and application of electricity, electronics and electromagnetism. The field first became an identifiable occupation in the late nineteenth century after commercialization of the electric telegraph and electrical...
who co-founded the Western Electric Manufacturing Company
Western Electric
Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering company, the manufacturing arm of AT&T from 1881 to 1995. It was the scene of a number of technological innovations and also some seminal developments in industrial management...
. Gray is best known for his development of a telephone prototype
Invention of the telephone
The invention of the telephone is the culmination of work done by many individuals, the history of which involves a collection of claims and counterclaims. The development of the modern telephone involved an array of lawsuits founded upon the patent claims of several individuals...
in 1876 in Highland Park, Illinois
Highland Park, Illinois
Highland Park is a suburban municipality in Lake County, Illinois, United States, about north of downtown Chicago. As of 2009, the population is 33,492. Highland Park is one of several municipalities located on the North Shore of the Chicago Metropolitan Area.-Overview:Highland Park was founded...
and is considered by some writers to be the true inventor of the variable resistance telephone, despite losing out to Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone....
for the telephone patent
Invention of the telephone
The invention of the telephone is the culmination of work done by many individuals, the history of which involves a collection of claims and counterclaims. The development of the modern telephone involved an array of lawsuits founded upon the patent claims of several individuals...
.
Gray is also considered to be the father of the modern music synthesizer
Synthesizer
A synthesizer is an electronic instrument capable of producing sounds by generating electrical signals of different frequencies. These electrical signals are played through a loudspeaker or set of headphones...
, and was awarded over 70 patents for his inventions.
Biography and early inventions
Born into a Quaker family in Barnesville, OhioBarnesville, Ohio
Barnesville is a village in Belmont County, Ohio, United States. It is part of the Wheeling, West Virginia Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 4,225 at the 2000 census...
, Gray was brought up on a farm. He spent several years at Oberlin College
Oberlin College
Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, noteworthy for having been the first American institution of higher learning to regularly admit female and black students. Connected to the college is the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the oldest continuously operating...
where he experimented with electrical devices. Although Gray was not a graduate of Oberlin College, he taught electricity and science at Oberlin and built laboratory equipment for Oberlin science departments.
In 1862 while at Oberlin, Gray met and married Delia Minerva Shepard.
In 1865 Gray invented a self-adjusting telegraph relay that automatically adapted to varying insulation of the telegraph line.
In 1867 Gray received a patent for the self-adjusting telegraph relay and in later years he received patents for more than 70 other inventions.
In 1869, Elisha Gray and his partner Enos M. Barton founded Gray & Barton Co. in Cleveland, Ohio to supply telegraph equipment to the giant Western Union Telegraph Company. The electrical distribution business was later spun off from Western Electric and organized into a separate company, Graybar Electric Company
Graybar Electric Company
Graybar is a wholesale distribution business, included on the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations. Founded in Cleveland, Ohio in 1869, the company is currently based in St. Louis, Missouri...
, Inc.. Barton had been employed by Western Union
Western Union
The Western Union Company is a financial services and communications company based in the United States. Its North American headquarters is in Englewood, Colorado. Up until 2006, Western Union was the best-known U.S...
to examine and test new products.
In 1870 financing for Gray & Barton Co. was arranged by General Anson Stager
Anson Stager
Anson Stager was the co-founder of Western Union, the first president of Western Electric Manufacturing Company and Union Army general, where he was head of the Military Telegraph Department during the Civil War.-Biography:...
, a superintendent of the Western Union Telegraph Company. Stager became an active partner in Gray & Barton Co., which moved to Chicago. Gray moved from Ohio to Highland Park
Highland Park, Illinois
Highland Park is a suburban municipality in Lake County, Illinois, United States, about north of downtown Chicago. As of 2009, the population is 33,492. Highland Park is one of several municipalities located on the North Shore of the Chicago Metropolitan Area.-Overview:Highland Park was founded...
near Chicago and remained on the board of directors. But he 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
Acoustic telegraphy
Acoustic telegraphy was also known as harmonic telegraphy. During the late 19th century, inventors developed methods of multiplexing telegraph messages simultaneously over a single telegraph wire by using different audio frequencies or channels, for each message. A telegrapher used a conventional...
which promised huge profits to the exclusion of what appeared to be unpromising competing inventions such as the telephone. It was White's decision in 1876 to abandon Gray's caveat for the telephone.
In 1870, Gray developed a needle annunciator for hotels and another for elevators. He also developed a telegraph printer which had a typewriter keyboard and printed messages on paper tape.
In 1872 Western Union
Western Union
The Western Union Company is a financial services and communications company based in the United States. Its North American headquarters is in Englewood, Colorado. Up until 2006, Western Union was the best-known U.S...
, then financed by the Vanderbilts and J. P. Morgan
J. P. Morgan
John Pierpont Morgan was an American financier, banker and art collector who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation during his time. In 1892 Morgan arranged the merger of Edison General Electric and Thomson-Houston Electric Company to form General Electric...
, bought one-third of Gray and Barton Co. and changed the name to Western Electric Manufacturing Company of Chicago
Western Electric
Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering company, the manufacturing arm of AT&T from 1881 to 1995. It was the scene of a number of technological innovations and also some seminal developments in industrial management...
. 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, each tone being controlled by 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 electric musical instrument
Electric instrument
An electric musical instrument is one in which the use of electric devices determines or affects the sound produced by an instrument. It is also known as an amplified musical instrument due to the common utilization of an electronic instrument amplifier to project the intended sound as determined...
using self vibrating electromagnetic circuits that were single-note oscillators operated by a two-octave piano keyboard. The "Musical Telegraph" used steel reeds whose oscillations were created by electromagnets and transmitted over a telegraph wire. Gray also 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. In 1900 Gray was working on an underwater signaling device. After his death in 1901 officers were investigating his house, who then gave the invention to Oberlin College and some of the students tested it out. After a few years of testing he was recognized as the inventor of the underwater signaling device.
On July 27, 1875, Gray was granted patent 166,096 for "Electric Telegraph for Transmitting Musical Tones" (acoustic telegraphy
Acoustic telegraphy
Acoustic telegraphy was also known as harmonic telegraphy. During the late 19th century, inventors developed methods of multiplexing telegraph messages simultaneously over a single telegraph wire by using different audio frequencies or channels, for each message. A telegrapher used a conventional...
).
Elisha Gray and the telephone
Because of Samuel White's opposition to Gray working on the telephone, Gray did not tell anybody about his new invention for transmitting voice sounds until February 11, 1876 (Friday). Gray requested that his patent lawyer William D. Baldwin prepare a "caveat" for filing at the US Patent Office. A caveatPatent caveat
A patent caveat was a legal document filed with the United States Patent Office. Caveats were instituted by the US Patent Act of 1836, but were discontinued in 1909. A caveat was like a patent application with a description of an invention and drawings, but without claims. It was an official...
was like a provisional patent application with drawings and description but without a request for examination.
Alexander Graham Bell
Alexander Graham Bell was an eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator who is credited with inventing the first practical telephone....
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. 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. 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 on Monday, a few hours after Gray's caveat was delivered to the patent office 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 in the US patent office.
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 first to invent rules, that Bell had invented that feature before Gray.
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 over Gray's caveat and Gray's earlier application. On March 3, Wilber approved Bell's application and on March 7, 1876 patent 174,465 was published by the U.S. Patent Office
United States Patent and Trademark Office
The United States Patent and Trademark Office is an agency in the United States Department of Commerce that issues patents to inventors and businesses for their inventions, and trademark registration for product and intellectual property identification.The USPTO is based in Alexandria, Virginia,...
.
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 and very similar to that shown in Gray's caveat." Bell and Watson built and tested Gray's water transmitter design on March 10 and successfully transmitted clear speech saying "Mr. Watson -- come here -- I want to see you." Bell's notebooks did not become public until the 1990s.
The importance of Bell's test of Gray's water transmitter idea was it proved that clear speech could be transmitted electrically. It was a scientific experiment, not development of a commercial product. Prior to that, Bell had only an unproven theory.
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 Patent Office determined "while Gray was undoubtedly the first to conceive of and disclose the [variable resistance] invention, as in his caveat of 14 February 1876, his failure to take any action amounting to completion until others had demonstrated the utility of the invention deprives him of the right to have it considered." Gray challenged Bell's patent anyway, and after two years of litigation, Bell was awarded rights to the invention, and as a result, Bell is credited as the inventor.
In 1886, the patent examiner (Zenas Fisk Wilber) stated in a sworn affidavit that he was an alcoholic and deeply in debt to Bell's lawyer Marcellus Bailey
Marcellus Bailey
Marcellus Bailey was an American patent attorney who, with Anthony Pollok, helped prepare Alexander Graham Bell's patents for the telephone and related inventions.-Biography:...
with whom Wilber had served in the Civil War. Wilber stated that, contrary to Patent Office rules, he showed Bailey the caveat Gray had filed. Wilber also 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 Gray, Bell admitted that he learned some of the technical details.
Bell's patent was also disputed in 1888 by attorney Lysander Hill who accused Wilber of allowing Bell or his lawyer Pollok to add a handwritten margin note of 7 sentences to Bell's application that describe an alternate design similar to Gray's liquid microphone design. However, the marginal note was added only to Bell's earlier draft, not as a marginal addition to his patent application that shows the 7 sentences already present in a paragraph in Bell's patent application when it was filed in the Patent Office on February 14, 1876. Bell testified that he added those 7 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 7 sentences to the application after it was filed in the Patent Office, because then there would not have been any 90 day suspension of Bell's application on February 19.
Although Bell was accused, and is still accused, of stealing the telephone from Gray, Bell used Gray's water transmitter design only after Bell's patent was granted and only as a proof of concept
Proof of concept
A proof of concept or a proof of principle is a realization of a certain method or idea to demonstrate its feasibility, or a demonstration in principle, whose purpose is to verify that some concept or theory that has the potential of being used...
scientific experiment to prove to his own satisfaction that intelligible "articulate speech" (Bell's words) could be electrically transmitted. Bell's assistant Thomas Watson testified that he tested all of the competing designs. 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. When Bell demonstrated his telephone at the Centennial Exhibition in June 1876, he used his improved electromagnetic transmitter, not Gray's water transmitter.
Gray's further inventions
In 1887 Gray invented the "telautographTelautograph
The telautograph, an analog precursor to the modern fax machine, transmits electrical impulses recorded by potentiometers at the sending station to servomechanisms attached to a pen at the receiving station, thus reproducing at the receiving station a drawing or signature made by the sender...
", 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 charted in 1888 and continued in business as The Telautograph Corporation for many years; after a series of mergers it was finally absorbed by Xerox
Xerox
Xerox Corporation is an American multinational document management corporation that produced and sells a range of color and black-and-white printers, multifunction systems, photo copiers, digital production printing presses, and related consulting services and supplies...
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.
Gray displayed his telautograph invention in 1893 at the 1893 Columbian Exposition and sold his share in the telautograph shortly after that. Gray was also chairman of the International Congress of Electricians at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.
Gray conceived of a primitive closed-circuit television
Closed-circuit television
Closed-circuit television is the use of video cameras to transmit a signal to a specific place, on a limited set of monitors....
system that he called the "telephote". 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
Newtonville, Massachusetts
Newtonville is a village of Newton, Massachusetts.Located in Newtonville is Newton North High School, one of the city's two high schools. Also located in Newtonville is the MBTA Commuter Rail train station, which is serviced by the buses 59, 553, 554, and 556....
.
As of 2006 no book-length biography has been written about the life of Elisha Gray. An Oberlin
Oberlin College
Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio, noteworthy for having been the first American institution of higher learning to regularly admit female and black students. Connected to the college is the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, the oldest continuously operating...
physics department head named Dr. Lloyd W. Taylor 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.
Gray's 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
- Invention of the telephoneInvention of the telephoneThe invention of the telephone is the culmination of work done by many individuals, the history of which involves a collection of claims and counterclaims. The development of the modern telephone involved an array of lawsuits founded upon the patent claims of several individuals...
- Timeline of the telephoneTimeline of the telephoneBelow is a timeline of the telephone that covers many important dates in the history of the telephone.- 1844 to 1875 :* 1844: Innocenzo Manzetti first mooted the idea of a “speaking telegraph” ....
- The Telephone CasesThe Telephone CasesThe Telephone Cases were a series of U.S. court cases in the 1870s and 1880s related to the invention of the telephone, which culminated in the 1888 decision of the United States Supreme Court upholding the priority of the patents belonging to Alexander Graham Bell...
- Water microphoneWater microphoneA water microphone or water transmitter is based on Ohm's law that current in a wire varies inversely with the resistance of the circuit. The sound waves from a human voice cause a diaphragm to vibrate which causes a needle or rod to vibrate up and down in water that has been made conductive by a...
External links
- Elisha Gray biography from Oberlin
- 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 over the harmonic telegraph
- "Telautograph" description
- 1911 Britannica article
- Grave of Elish Gray in Rosehill Cemetery, ChicagoRosehill Cemetery, ChicagoRosehill Cemetery is a Victorian era cemetery on the North Side of Chicago, Illinois, USA, and at , is the largest cemetery in the City of Chicago. The name "Rosehill" resulted from a City Clerk's error – the area was previously called "Roe's Hill", named for nearby farmer Hiram Roe...