Gray’s Music: Over the Telegraph

Alexander Graham Bell gets all the credit for inventing the telephone, but that’s because he triumphed in the legal arena all the way to the Supreme Court in 1888. The simple stories of great inventors obscure the fact that technological innovations often have many parents. When it comes to the telephone, Elisha Gray should have received far more credit than he has; he filed a patent for the telephone on the same day as Bell, February 14, 1876. The legal battle between the two was no contest, however.