Who invented the telephone, was it ….?

You would think this was a silly question because we all know that it was Alexander Graham Bell who invented the telephone, but did you know that in fact there was a dispute because Elisha Gray also claimed to have invented the telephone, and he wasn’t the only one!

It appears that there are regularly problems in deciding who the inventor is of something. Usually, the credit goes to the inventor of the most practical or best working invention rather than to the original inventor.

To go back to my original question, maybe a better question should be whether two of them invented the telephone independently or whether they helped each other.

At the end of the day, it ended up going to the lawyers. Of course, once you get lawyers involved it goes on forever. 

The Inventors

By 1874 these two were people competing to invent the first Telephone..

Alexander Graham Bell

A professor at Boston University, a Scotsman who came to Boston in 1867, there he started researching into calligraphy.  At the time his aim being to transmit multiple messages over a single wire at the same time.

He funded this by forming a partnership with two of his students’ parents, in exchange for shares in any future profits he created.

Between the years 1872 and 1876 he tried to work out how to make different transmitters work and receive, he was successful, so in 1875 he filed a patent for a primitive fax machine that used liquid transmitters.

Elisha Gray

At the same time, he was a well-known inventor, living in Illinois, where he had a company, Western Electric, that was a major supplier to the telegraph company, Western Union.

By 1874 Bell and Grey were competing to invent the first Telegraph.

Then the problems started!

You guessed it; they both put in their Patent requests at the same time!  

Unfortunately, it appeared that Elisha Grey had put in a patent with very similar similarities to the notes in Alexander Graham Bell’s notebook.  So, the question is who was first to come up with the idea?

Who was first?

In the summer of 1874 Grey developed a telegraphic device that actually transmitted musical tones, but not speech that you could actually understand. Grey then filed a patent application.

However, Alexander Graham Bell’s lawyer found that the diagram for a telephone in Grey’s patent application was similar to the diagram in Bell’s notebook. You see on same day, Bell’s lawyer handed in a patent application.

Then the Patent Office suspended Bell’s application to give him more time to submit a full patent application, so the Patent Office could determine who was first to invent a telephone.

It is interesting as at that time the US Congress had changed the requirements for patent, and you didn’t have to show a full working model to get a patent.

Anyway, in the end, in February 1876 Bell went to Washington and returned to Boston apparently with the diagram for the patent that was similar to Gray’s diagram.

What isn’t disputed

Is that on 10th March  1876 Alexander Graham Bell finally got his telephone to work using the famous words, that have gone down in history.   Using his new instrument he spoke these famous words to his assistant, Thomas Watson “Watson come in here I want to see you “.

With these words he has gone down in history as the inventor of the telephone.

But there was also another claimant!

Yes, believe it or not since 1849 somebody else had also been developing a telephone, Antonio Meucci, an Italian immigrant.

Meucci set up a voice-communication link in his Staten Island, New York, home connecting his second-floor bedroom to his laboratory. He submitted a patent to the U.S. Patent Office in 1871, but he didn’t mention the electromagnetic transmission of vocal sound in his submission. It took until the U.S. House of Representatives in a resolution in 2002 to also acknowledged Meucci’s work in the invention of the telephone.   Unfortunately, the U.S. Senate did not join the resolution or the interpretation of it, so it was therefore disputed.

So, who was the first?

Well, we don’t know, but we do know that the one who claimed all the credit and went down in history was Alexander Graham Bell, but if he really was the first we don’t know?

Isn’t history fun

10 questions to discuss:

1. 1. 1. How did Alexander Graham Bell’s background in calligraphy influence his pursuit of inventing the telephone?
      2. What were the key differences between Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray’s approaches to inventing the telephone?
      3. Can you describe the significance of the patent dispute between Bell and Gray, and how it influenced the recognition of the telephone’s inventor?
      4. What role did Western Electric, Elisha Gray’s company, play in the development of telecommunication technology during that time?
      5. How did the change in patent requirements by the US Congress impact the race to invent the telephone?
      6. What were some of the challenges faced by Antonio Meucci in his pursuit of inventing the telephone, and why was his contribution disputed?
      7. Beyond Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray, were there any other notable contenders in the race to invent the telephone?
      8. How did Alexander Graham Bell finally prove the functionality of his telephone, and what were the famous words he spoke?
      9. What were the implications of the US House of Representatives’ resolution acknowledging Antonio Meucci’s contribution to the invention of the telephone?
      10. In your opinion, considering the various claims and disputes, who do you think deserves the most credit for inventing the telephone, and why?

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