Elisha Gray is an American inventor and was born on August 2, 1835.

The Western Electric Manufacturing Company was founded by an American electrical engineer named Elisha Gray.In 1876, Gray developed a telephone prototype in Highland Park, Illinois.Alexander Graham Bell is accused of stealing the idea of the liquid transmitter from Gray, so some authors argue that Gray should be considered the true inventor.Bell's telephone patent was upheld in many court decisions despite the fact that Gray had been using liquid transmitters for more than two years.

Gray was granted over 70 patents for his inventions and is considered to be the father of the modern music synthesizer.Shortly after Graybar's inception, he purchased a controlling interest in the company.

The son of Christiana and David Gray was born in Barnesville, Ohio.His family was from the Quakers.He was raised on a farm.He was at the college experimenting with electrical devices.Even though Gray didn't graduate, he built laboratory equipment for the science departments.

The self-adjusting telegraph relay was invented by Gray in 1865.Gray received a patent for his invention in 1867.

The Gray & Barton Co. was founded in 1869 to supply telegraph equipment to the Western Union Telegraph Company.The Graybar Electric Company, Inc. was formed after the electrical distribution business was spun off.

General Anson Stager arranged the financing for Gray & Barton Co.Stager remained on the board of directors after becoming an active partner in Gray & Barton Co.The company moved to Chicago.Gray gave up his administrative position to focus on inventions that could benefit the telegraph industry.A dentist from Philadelphia financed Gray's inventions and patent costs.White wanted Gray to focus on the acoustic telegraph which promised huge profits instead of competing inventions such as the telephone.Gray's interest in the telephone was diverted by White in 1876.

Gray developed a needle annunciator for hotels in 1870.A microphone printer with a typewriter and paper tape was developed by him.

The name of the company was changed to Western Electric Manufacturing Company of Chicago.Gray was still inventing for Western Electric.

In 1874, Gray retired to do his own research.Gray applied for a patent on a telegraph that had multi-tone transmitters that controlled each tone with a separate telegraph key.Gray demonstrated the invention in New York and Washington, D.C. in 1874.

Gray was a member of the Presbyterian Church.The first public demonstration of Gray's invention was held at the church on December 29, 1874.This was one of the earliest electric musical instruments that used single-note oscillators and were powered by a two-octave piano keyboard.Steel reeds were used in the "Musical Telegraph" to amplify the sound of a telegraph wire.Gray built a simple loudspeaker in later models that used a vibrating diaphragm in a magnetic field to amplify the sound at the receiving end.Gray worked on an underwater signaling device.The invention was given to Oberlin College after his death.He was recognized as the inventor of the underwater signaling device a few years later.

Gray was granted a U.S. patent for "Electric Telegraph for Transmitting Musical Tones" in July of 1875.

Because of Samuel White's opposition to Gray working on the telephone, Gray did not tell anyone about his invention until February 11, 1876.William D. Baldwin was asked by Gray to prepare a "caveat" for filing a patent.A caveat was similar to a patent application but without a request for examination.

On February 14, 1876, Gray signed and notarized the caveat that described the telephone.The caveat was submitted to the US Patent Office.Bell's patent application was submitted by his lawyer that morning.Gray believed that his caveat arrived a few hours before Bell's application.Bell's lawyers in Washington, DC, were told not to file the patent application in the USA until it had been filed in Britain.Britain would only issue patents on discoveries not previously patented elsewhere.

During the weekend of February 12–14, 1876, Bell's lawyer was told about the liquid transmitter idea by Gray in his caveat that would be filed early Monday morning.Bell's lawyer added seven sentences about the liquid transmitter and variable resistance claim to the draft application.Bell's lawyer hand-delivered the finished application to the patent office just before noon on Monday, a few hours after Gray delivered his caveat.Bell's lawyer requested that his application be recorded and hand-delivered to the examiner on Monday so that he could claim it had arrived first.Bell wasn't aware that his application had been filed when he was in Boston.[8]

On February 19th, Zenas Fisk Wilber noticed that Bell's application claimed the same variable resistance feature.Bell's application was suspended for 90 days to give Gray time to submit a competing patent application.The suspension 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.Bell's application would be delayed until Bell submitted proof that he invented that feature before Gray.[9]

Bell was told by his lawyer to come to Washington, DC.Bell went to his lawyers and was told that Gray's caveat showed a liquid transmitter and that Bell had invented it.Bell pointed to an application where mercury was used in a circuit breaker.The examiner accepted the argument that mercury wouldn't have worked in a telephone transmitter.An amendment to Bell's claims was submitted by his lawyer on February 29th.The U.S. Patent Office published the patent on March 7, 1876.

Bell returned to Boston on March 9 and drew a diagram in his lab notebook that was very similar to the one shown in Gray's caveat.On March 10, Bell and Watson built and tested a liquid transmitter that successfully transmitted clear speech.The Library of Congress received Bell's notebooks in 1976.It was [13].

Although Bell has been accused of stealing the telephone from Gray 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.Ten months before the alleged theft of Gray's design, the U.S. Patent Office granted Bell a patent for a primitive fax machine.There are liquid transmitters in the patent drawing.

Bell andWatson never used Gray's liquid transmitter in public demonstrations or commercial use after March 1876.[15]

Gray applied for a patent for the same invention in the late 19th century.He was in a second interference with Bell's patents.The Patent Office determined that Gray's failure to take any action until others had shown the utility of the invention deprives him of his right to have it.After two years of litigation, Bell was awarded rights to the invention, and he is credited as the inventor.

In 1886, Wilber stated in an affidavit that he was an alcoholic and deeply in debt to Bell's lawyer Marcellus Bailey with whom he had served in the Civil War.According to Wilber, he showed Bailey the caveat Gray had filed.He stated that Bell gave him $100 after he showed the caveat to him.Bell admitted in a letter to Gray that he learned some of the technical details about the patent.Historians have pointed out that his last affidavit was drafted for him by the attorneys for the Pan-Electric Company which was attempting to steal the Bell patents and was later discovered to have bribed the U.S. Attorney General.

Bell was accused of adding a handwritten margin note to his patent application in order to show an alternate design similar to Gray's liquid microphone design.The marginal note was only added to Bell's earlier draft, not his patent application.Bell said he added the seven sentences in the margin of an earlier draft of his application "almost at the last moment before sending it off to Washington."The application would not have been suspended if Bell or his lawyer had added the seven sentences.[19]

Gray invented a device that could be used to remotely transmit handwriting.After a series of mergers it was finally absorbed by Xerox in the 1990s, but the Gray National Telautograph Company continued to operate for many years.Banks and the military used Gray's telautograph machines for signing documents at a distance and for sending written commands during gun tests when the deafening noise from the guns made spoken orders on the telephone impractical.At train stations, the machines were used for schedule changes.There is a citation needed.

Gray sold his share in the telautograph after he displayed his invention in 1893.The International Congress of Electricians was chaired by Gray.