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Sometimes there is more to
the story than first meets the eye, and there are a few things in
this story that you will disagree with at first. Stick with me,
though, and I assure you that it will make sense in the end.
Our first inventor was born in 1835, in Barnesville, Ohio, to a
Quaker family. He grew up on a farm. Later in life he worked as a
carpenter and as a teacher.
He did not start the Bell Telephone Company or AT&T, but he was a
co-founder of the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, which was
the parent firm of the present Western Electric Company.
On Feb. 14, 1876, he filed an application with the U.S. patent
office for his telephone. In fact, he found himself facing another
inventor in a lawsuit that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme
Court, where he lost!
The inventor's name was Elisha Gray, and he filed for his patent
just two hours after Alexander Graham Bell filed his patent
application.
Our other inventor, the one who created the world's first
incandescent light bulb, was born in 1828. He began an
apprenticeship with a pharmacist when he was 13, and he later became
a chemist, a physicist and then an inventor.
He teamed up with another inventor to form the Edison and Swan
United Company. He was knighted in 1904.
Most people don't know that the inventor of the world's first
incandescent light bulb was born in England -- Sunderland, England,
to be exact, and he was born on Halloween.
His name was Joseph Swan, and he beat Edison to the light bulb by
a year, in 1877. Despite this, he also came in second.
Why Bell and Edison instead of Gray and Swan?
[to top of second column
in this article]
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It turns out that Bell had kept better records for his version of the
telephone invention than Gray did. Plus, what Gray filed was a caveat
rather than an actual application. Filing a caveat meant that he was
declaring his intent to file an application at a later date. He did this
because he hadn't yet perfected the technology. Ironically, Bell used the
exact type of microphone that Gray invented for his telephone.
The difference between Edison and Swan is that Edison had set up
the infrastructure to run his light bulbs. What good are light bulbs
if there is no way to power them? Think of what TV would be like
without any programming.
The headline of this story says that the inventors of the
telephone and the light bulb had something in common. Actually, they
had someone in common: an employee named Lewis Latimer, whom
you will hear about again in February during Black History Month.
Latimer was the only person who worked for both Bell and
Edison.
He played a very important role with both inventors. He worked
for Bell first, helping him draft his blueprints for the telephone.
He then went to work for Edison, developing the carbon filament for
the incandescent light bulb. He also helped in filing the patents
for it.
The kind of co-invention that happened with Bell and Gray and
with Edison and Swan occurs more often than you would think. There
were close races between other inventors working separately but
simultaneously to develop other major inventions. These include
TV, where Philo Farnsworth won out over Vladimir Zworykin and John
Baird; radio, with Nikola Tesla over Guglielmo Marconi, for whom
the Marconi Radio Awards are named; and electricity, with Nikola
Tesla's AC over Thomas Edison's DC.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
[Paul Niemann]
Paul Niemann is the author of Invention Mysteries. He can be
reached at niemann7@aol.com.
© Copyright Paul Niemann 2005
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