ic toy than as a commercially
valuable device.

By an extraordinary coincidence, the very day that Bell's application
for a patent went into the United States Patent Office, a caveat was
filed there by Elisha Gray, of Chicago, covering the specific idea of
transmitting speech and reproducing it in a telegraphic circuit "through
an instrument capable of vibrating responsively to all the tones of
the human voice, and by which they are rendered audible." Out of this
incident arose a struggle and a controversy whose echoes are yet heard
as to the legal and moral rights of the two inventors, the assertion
even being made that one of the most important claims of Gray, that on
a liquid battery transmitter, was surreptitiously "lifted" into the
Bell application, then covering only the magneto telephone. It was also
asserted that the filing of the Gray caveat antedated by a few hours
the filing of the Bell application. All such issues when brought to
the American courts were brushed aside, the Bell patent being broadly
maintained in all its remarkable breadth and fullness, embracing an
entire art; but Gray was embittered and chagrined, and to the last
expressed his belief that the honor and glory should have been his. The
path of Gray to the telephone was a natural one. A Quaker carpenter who
studied five years at Oberlin College, he took up electrical invention,
and brought out many ingenious devices in rapid succession in the
telegraphic field, including the now universal needle annunciator for
hotels, etc., the useful telautograph, automatic self-adjusting relays,
private-line printers--leading up to his famous "harmonic" system. This
was based upon the principle that a sound produced in the presence of a
reed or tuning-fork responding to the sound, and acting as the armature
of a magnet in a closed circuit, would, by induction, set up electric
impulses in the circuit and cause a distant magnet having a similarly
tuned armature to produce the same tone or note. He also found that over
the same wire at the same time another series of impulses corresponding
to another note could be sent through the agency of a second set
of magnets without in any way interfering with the first series of
impulses. Building the principle into apparatus, with a keyboard and
vibrating "reeds" before his magnets, Doctor Gray was able not only to
transmit music by his harmonic telegraph, but went so far as to send
nine different telegraph messages at