Elisha Gray

Elisha Gray ( born August 2, 1835 in Barnesville, Ohio; † January 21, 1901 in Newtonville, Massachusetts ) was an American teacher, inventor and entrepreneur.

Gray lost at the age of 12 years, his father, and had thus dropped out of school. He first learned the trade of a blacksmith, a carpenter and a boatbuilder. In 1856 he entered Oberlin College in Ohio, where he studied five years physics. He became a teacher at this institution and later at Ripon College in Wisconsin.

Services

His first patent for a telegraphic device ranged Gray in 1867, this was followed by 50 more, mostly in the field of telephone and telegraph equipment. 1869 Gray moved to Cleveland, Ohio and founded a company for electrical items, which was later moved to Chicago and with the Western Electric Manufacturing Company to the Western Electric Company united. 1878 Gray resigned from the company in order to devote himself to his studies and the use of his inventions, which were mainly relays and printing telegraph.

1875 Gray began experiments with the electrical transmission of voice, the result of which was laid down in 1876 in a patent application. However, he did not get the patent because Alexander Graham Bell submitted a patent application on the same object two hours before Gray. In a lawsuit did not succeed Gray and allied with him Western Electric Company to enforce its claims against Bell.

Another invention is the Grays Tele autograph, presented in 1893 at the Chicago World's Fair, at the improvement he worked until his last years as well as in the development of an underwater sound signal system. The operation of the tele autographs, the precursor of the modern fax machine, Gray has described as follows:

" The writing apparatus at the departure points can be installed in any home, Comptoir, rooms, in the extends a telegraphic or telephonic cable on a simple desk or desk. An ordinary pencil is used for writing. At its peak, two silken cords are attached at right angles to each other, which, coupled with the apparatus accurately follow the movement of the pencil and control the receive pin at the other end of the line in remote town, so in the residence of the addressee electrically. The common 5 inch wide paper on the feeding station passes over a pulley attached to the apparatus and is similar to the known Type -Writer, or typewriter, by pressing a lever, line by line electrically shifted. At the receiving end of the addressee hold two aluminum arms that continually fed with ink hair-thin glass tube, which serves as a spring to the transcript and, guided by the electric current from the sender of the message from, at the same time and in the same direction and stretch with each movement of the distant pencil at the departure end moved in such a way that their writing in ink a very accurate representation of what the author writes at the departure end of the pencil or records. Drawings, stenographic characters and other hieroglyphs can be transmitted by wire also. "

• Americans
• Teacher (19th century)
• Entrepreneurs (19th Century )
• Engineer, inventor, engineer
• Personality of Electrical Engineering
• Born in 1835
• Died in 1901
• Man