In a new book "The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret," due out January 7, journalist Seth Shulman, claims to have definitive evidence of a long-suspected technological crime - that Alexander Graham Bell [picture left] stole ideas for the telephone from a rival, Elisha Gray. Author Shulman believes that Bell — aided by aggressive lawyers and a corrupt patent examiner — got an improper peek at patent documents Gray had filed, and that Bell was erroneously credited with filing first. Alexander Graham Bell- Patent Thief? on Slashdot well summarized the main contents of Shulman's book
...Author Seth Shulman shows that Bell's notebooks contain false starts, and then after a 12-day gap during which he visited the US Patent Office, suddenly show an entirely different design, very similar to Gray's design for multiplexing Morse code signals. Shulman claims that Bell copied the design from Gray's patent application and was improperly given credit for earlier submission, with the help of a corrupt patent examiner and aggressive lawyers. Shulman also claims that fear of being found out is the reason Bell distanced himself from the company that carried his name. And if Gray Telephone doesn't seem to roll off the tongue, Shulman also noted that both of them were two decades behind the German inventor Johann Philipp Reis, who produced the first working telephony system."
Click here to read the full report on Smh.
#Tags: bell, telephone, elisha gray