Engineers
Elisha Gray
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Elisha Gray was an American electrical engineer and co-founder of what became the Western Electric Manufacturing Company. He filed a patent caveat describing a telephone-like device on February 14, 1876, the same day Alexander Graham Bell's own telephone patent application reached the United States Patent Office, a coincidence that made him Bell's principal rival in the resulting decades of litigation over who invented the telephone first.
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The Telephone, Inventions Why this is disputed. Gray's February 14, 1876 caveat described a similar voice-transmission method filed the same day as Bell's application; the United States Patent Office and later courts upheld Bell's patent, but the question of who reached the idea first has never been settled to universal satisfaction.
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