Today in History

February 14, 1876

Patent Applications for the Telephone

William Orton, the president of Western Union, was worried. Telegraph traffic was expanding faster than the telegraph lines could handle them. Only a single message could be carried at a time, a severe limitation even in the earliest days of the new technology. He contracted with inventor Alexander Graham Bell to find a way to overcome the bottleneck and to develop a system for transmitting multiple telegraph messages at a time. Bell's experiments soon convinced him that it was possible not just for electrical pulses but for actual human voice to be transmitted.

Elisha Gray was also working on aspects of the new telegraph technology. In the course of his experimentation, he developed the acoustical telegraph, capable of transmitting musical notes across the wires. He, too, realized that the telegraph could lead to the transmission of voice across electrical wires. His financiers wanted him to focus on the telegraph, however, so he worked on his development of the telephone in secret.

On the morning of Monday, February 14, 1876, Gray signed and had notarized a patent application that described a telephone that used a water microphone and submitted it to the US Patent Office. That same morning, a lawyer submitted Alexander Graham Bell's patent application, without Bell's knowledge that he was doing so at the time. Gray's application arrived first. However, by chance, it was Bell's application that was first recorded, and history remembers him as the inventor of the telephone.

You are free to use this content in your own newsletters and emails with your clients. Travel Research Online is a free service to all professional travel agents offering more than 650 destination guides, epostcards and other marketing and research tools.