Gray, Elisha

Gray, Elisha

(1835–1901) inventor, manufacturer; born in Barnesville, Ohio. He worked as a blacksmith, a boatbuilder, and a carpenter before starting a small concern to make telegraphic equipment of his own invention. His little business eventually became the Western Electric Co., and Gray's some 70 patents included one for a multiplex telegraph. He claimed to have invented the telephone in the 1870s, but lost the patent rights to Alexander Graham Bell in a case eventually decided in the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Cambridge Dictionary of American Biography, by John S. Bowman. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995. Reproduced with permission.