Elisha Gray (August 2nd 1835 with Barnesville, Ohio - January 21st 1901 with Newtonville, Massachusetts), is a American inventor .

Born in a family Quaker in Ohio, it is high in a farm. It makes its studies with Oberlin College in Ohio and works as a blacksmith, carpenter and a manufacturer of boats before founding its company in 1869, which becomes in 1872 the Western Electric (of which the department seeks and engineering will become the Laboratoires Beautiful), within which it makes research in particular on the Télégraphe.

Gray is the inventor in 1876 musical telegraph , ancestor of the Synthétiseur, based on the electric oscillator. The musical telegraph is equipped with a small keyboard and gives sound by the means of loudspeakers.

Elisha Gray makes deposit by its lawyer the February 14th 1876 an opinion of patent ( caveat ) to the US Patent Office (American office of the intellectual property) concerning the invention of the Téléphone. The same day however, a few hours earlier, Graham Bell deposits the final patent of the same invention. Several lawsuits follow on the attribution of the patent, lawsuit that Gray lost all, the invention of the telephone being finally allotted to Bell, before however of him being withdrawn in June 2002, the Room of the representatives of the United States having ruled that Antonio Meucci, which had deposited an patent application in 1871, was the true inventor of the telephone: Beautiful him paternity had flown from there.

Gray continuous to work on the telegraph and the telephone, and will deposit several patents in these fields. In 1880, he becomes dynamic professor of electricity in Oberlin College where he had made his studies, he dies in 1901 in Massachusetts.

Sources

• Elisha Gray on '' The Great Idea Finder ''
• Account of the deposit in US Patent Office for the invention of the telephone
• Mini biography of Elisha Gray

External bonds

• History of Western Electric
• opinion of patent deposited by Elisha Gray (caveat)