Alexander Graham Bell - Patent Thief?

DynaSoar writes "MSNBC is carrying an AP article reviewing a book, due out January 7, that claims to show definitive evidence that Bell stole the essential idea for telephony from Elisha Gray. 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."

Re:The most interesting thing about this controver

[$RANDOMLUSER]

I don't think you have to look much farther than calculus (Newton and Leibnoz) or evolution (Darwin and Wallace) or the incandescant light bulb (Edison and a cast of hundreds) to see that this is so.

Re:The most interesting thing about this controver

[arivanov]

Yep. And if stuff like that did not make you pause the fact that you gave an example which was simultaneously invented by at least two people should.

Radio was invented nearly simultaneously by Marconi and Popov in 1895 and surprise surprise it was all based on a work by German (Hertz) from a few years before that. Similarly, while Marconi invented very little (most inventions were done by Hertz, Popov and Ducretes) he gets the credit because he successfully drove it through the patent system.

Yet another history repeating... http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/theressomethingaboutmary/historyrepeating.htm [stlyrics.com]

Re:The most interesting thing about this controver

[rs79]

"

The patent was later given to Tesla.

I worked for the Gray Telephone and Telepgraph company in Los Angeles in the 80s. It had been renamed "Teleautograph" and made those funny "telewriter" things. They were getting out of that and selling fax machiens and over the power line email terminals when I left in 1989.

Re:That's interesting.

[deadweight]

Marconi *WAS* Bill Gates more so than anyone but Bill himself. He took existing technology and used clever legal maneuvering to build a monopoly. he used his wealth to buy out or destroy any competition. Radio was NOT invented by him. Tesla did it, but was more interested in transmitting power than information. A number of others had working radio inventions too, but no one saw the commercial prospects clearly. Marconi did see them and the legal/semi-legal shenanigans would have brought a smile to Bill G. He didn't SELL radios, he LEASED them to ship owners and provided the operators. These operators were told NOT to communicate with ship or shore stations run by any other company but Marconi! Doesn't that sound familiar! The scheme fell apart when the Titanic inspired the first SOLAS convention and rules for wireless. Read Thunderstruck for the amazing details of all this. Ham and CB operators will get a laugh at the fact that intentional QRM started basically with the invention of the second radio :(

Re:That's interesting.

[franksands]

That would be the Wright Brothers. And although their invention was sooner, it needed a catapult to be pushed into the air. Santos Dummont was the first person to build and pilot a vehicle that could take off, fly and land without any outside help.

Lotsa inaccuracies

[Ancient_Hacker]

First of all, the Gray patent was for sending multiple telegraph signals over one wire, nowadays known as analog frequency-division multiplexing. Bell either had the same idea, or borrowed parts of Gray's ideas, and by accident, made a telephone. It seems a bit of a stretch to call Gray's idea a "telephone", as it was more like sending beep-boop-bork tones over one wire. Nothing to do with voice. ANd it's also a stretch to claim Bell "stole" the Telephone idea. Independent inventions happen all the time.

Re:Antonio Meucci invented the t

[boris111]

A good teacher will tell you that Ford was the first to make it practical for the common man by making an assembly line for it. Every history teacher I had made that distinction.

Re:Patents don't promote disclosure

[servognome]

Trade secrets are very hard to keep in any case. There are a million ways that trade secrets leak out, most trivially by people taking a good look at the products in question.

There are many types of trade secrets. Knowing how to make something in a unique way won't necessarily come out by just looking at a product. Patents aren't just about revealing an idea, but how to actually realize it
Further not everything is easy to identify just by inspection. For example chemcial compounds are difficult to reverse engineer, and reverse engineering in itself is very expensive. Patents allow anybody to have an understanding on making something, not just big corporations who can afford resources to reverse engineer.

Re:The most interesting thing about this controver

[ShawnDoc]

Marconi is not famous because of the patent. He is famous as being the first one to propose using radio waves to send signals beyond LOS and that they could be used as a replacement for telegraph lines. At the time, his contemporaries believed Hertzian waves were only line of sight and so useless beyond a very short distance. It was his expiraments and work with the UK postal system that made people see the commercial application of Hertzian waves and drove much of the research that evolved into modern day radio. Marconi was obsessed with sending wireless waves from the UK to the USA, and it is his being the first one to have a commercially successful ship-to-ship system that got him the fame. I highly suggest the book Thunderstruck [amazon.com] by Erik Larson which details the race and competition in regards to radio research as well as the publicity stunts and history that got Marconi's name engraved into history.