Alexander Graham Bell gets all the credit for inventing the telephone, but that’s because he triumphed in the legal arena all the way to the Supreme Court in 1888. The simple stories of great inventors obscure the fact that technological innovations often have many parents. When it comes to the telephone, Elisha Gray should have received far more credit than he has; he filed a patent for the telephone on the same day as Bell, February 14, 1876. The legal battle between the two was no contest, however. As ethnomusicologist Roderic Knight writes, “In a string of court battles that went on for years, Gray was at a disadvantage because he was a quiet, dignified Quaker, while Bell was a charismatic courtroom witness and won every case brought against him.”
Gray’s legal defeats didn’t prevent him from continuing to tinker and invent, notably developing electrophonics, “or electricity as the handmaiden of sound.” Gray’s “Electro Harmonic Telegraph: Musical Transmitter,” patented in 1876, was, writes Knight, the “world’s first purpose-built electric musical instrument.” Among the seventy or so patents Gray filed, this one makes him a pioneer of electronic music—before electronics. Gray himself called his device an “electric telephone” and his transmitted musical performances “telephone concerts,” using “telephone” in its literal meaning of something capable of moving sound across distance.
At the age of nine, Gray became telegraph-mad upon hearing about Samuel F. B. Morse’s demonstration of the electric telegraph on May 1, 1844. “It was the first time news had traveled faster than a speeding train,” Knight writes. Gray responded by building a telegraph from materials he found at home. He didn’t stop tinkering after that. (You can pick and choose among on-line DIY telegraphy kits and tutorials.)
By the early 1870s, Gray’s explorations into “harmonic telegraphy,” sending multiple messages across a single wire at the same time, led him to his musical wonder.
There are four versions of Gray’s instrument extant. These consist of a mini-keyboard with a one- or two-octave range and metal reeds inside that are set in motion by electromagnets, generating harmonic motion and producing audible sound. This made the instruments electro-mechanical. But the point was connecting that sound signal with a telegraph, making the machines electro-acoustic, as with an electric guitar. With suitable receiving equipment at the other end, which Gray also invented, the sound played on the keyboard could be transmitted and heard elsewhere. This makes him a pioneer in the invention of the loudspeaker as well—his first one looks like an outdoor loudspeaker you’d find today. Gray saw the system as way to “help democratize the concert experience, a concept that was gaining traction in his day.”
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Knight points out that Gray’s creation was polyphonic: if you “press one key, you heard one note; press two or more, and you heard them all.” Notably, early synthesizers like the Moog (1964) were monophonic, “requiring overdubbing to produce a polyphonic sound.”
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Gray’s “telephone” had its public premier in a Highland Park, Illinois, church on December 29, 1874. It was used to transmit concerts to Steinway Hall in New York, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Lincoln Hall in Washington, DC, in 1877. But Gray seems to have felt that further refinements would take up too much of his time. He moved on to other things, including the Telautograph, an early fax-like machine that could send a drawing or anything handwritten over the wires. Introduced in 1893, the Telautograph system was used for decades. Xerox bought the descendant of the Telautograph Corp. in 1999 and renamed it Omnifax.
The reason you’ve probably never heard of Gray’s musical device is that “the technology was not fail-safe, for there were inherent problems with the telegraph system itself,” Knight writes. The telegraph relied on a single wire for transmission, “with the earth itself completing the circuit.” This worked well enough for the dots and dashes of Morse code, “but factors such as the local geologic and built-environment conditions, and even the weather, could interfere with the clean transmission of sustained musical tones.”
In a 2021 presentation for the American Musical Instrument Society, Knight introduces replicas of Gray’s devices and gives a demonstration.
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