Everybody knows that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone — except that two years before Bell demonstrated his, Elisha Gray had a working prototype. The music synthesizer is usually attributed to Robert Moog, who showed his in 1964. But Elisha Gray demonstrated one in 1864. He also invented a version of the first fax machine (in 1887), a version of television (in 1893), and co-founded Western Electric, a manufacturing company that produced the bulk of the telephone equipment in the US for most of the 20th century.
Gray was born August 2, 1835, on a farm in Ohio. He attended Oberlin College for a while, but he didn’t graduate. Instead, they hired him to teach electricity and science, and to build lab equipment for them. He filed his first patent (out of more than 70) in 1865, for a kind of telegraph relay. In 1870 he started working independently on inventions having to do with the telegraph — and he was financed by an early version of an “angel investor,” Dr. Samuel White. White was a dentist who got rich from creating teeth out of porcelain.
Gray and White didn’t always see eye to eye — Gray wanted to work on telephone systems, but White thought there was more money to be made in the “acoustic telegraph.” That was the idea that you could send more than one message at a time over a single telegraph wire by sending them as acoustic tones at different pitches. Gray invented that, too, and the idea is still around; it’s the basis of Frequency Division Multiple Access (FDMA), which is used in radio systems, microwaves, and coaxial networks.
If you’ve seen old movies where over the elevator door there’s a mechanical arrow pointing to the current floor the car is on, well, that’s another Gray invention. He was also a writer, and published four books popularizing science and technology in the late 1800s. His work had a huge influence on 20th Century technology, but he didn’t live to see it. He died on the first year of the new century, 1901.
