Elisha Gray was an electrical engineer known for his telephone prototype in 1876. Alexander Graham Bell is widely known as the genius who invented the telephone, but did he really? Seth Shulman doesn’t think so. In his new book, “The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell’s Secret,” Shulman makes the claim that Bell stole the idea of the telephone from Elisha Gray.
Shulman says that the proof is inn the lab notebook of Bell which was released in 1976. In the notebook several false starts can be found but then after 12 days of nothing and a trip to the U.S. Patent office a new design is suddenly revealed with noticeable similarities to Gray’s design for multiplexing Morse code signals.
Shulman writes that Bell’s fear of being revealed was his reason to distance himself from phone companies. He also notes that Gray and Bell were not the true inventors of the telephone in the first place. Shulman writes that Johann Philipp Reis, a German inventor, developed the first phone nearly two decades before.
