Lake Forest-Lake Bluff History Museum

American Mechanical Dictionary by Edward H. Knight, 1880.

Elisha Gray (1835-1901) is best known as the person who almost invented the telephone. Raised on a farm in Barnesville, Ohio, he worked as a blacksmith and built boats. He attended Oberlin College, earning his way as a carpenter. Elisha Gray moved to Highland Park with his wife and four children in 1871 and lectured in physics at Lake Forest College between 1882 and 1892.Gray invented a number of telegraphic devices and in 1869 was one of two partners who founded what became Western Electric Company (now Lucent Technologies). On February 14, 1876, Alexander Graham Bell filed an application for a patent for a telephone. Just hours later, Gray applied for a caveat announcing his intention to file a claim for a patent for the same invention within three months.In the legal cases that followed, the claims of Gray and Bell came into direct conflict, and Bell was awarded the patent.

Gray’s patent caveat described an apparatus “for transmitting and receiving vocal sounds telegraphically.” Indeed, Alexander Graham Bell’s patent used a metal-diaphragm receiver built and publicly used by Gray months earlier. Bell’s device depended on microphone elements credited to Gray.

Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray corresponded about their inventions in a cordial way, including this telegram dated February 24, 1877. Bell Telephone Company later acquired the patents of Gray and others.

In 1880, Gray became a professor of dynamic electricity at Oberlin College in Ohio. He obtained over 70 patents, mostly related to the telegraph and telephone. One patent was for the “telautograph,” a type of facsimile machine. Gray won awards for his electrical achievements at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and at Paris expositions in the 1870s and 1880s.

The Man Who Almost Invented the Telephone