competitor of the Bell
organization than scores of small, local companies sprang up, all
ready to pirate the Bell patent and push the claims of some rival
inventor. A very few of them really tried to establish telephone
systems, but the majority were organized simply to sell stock to a
gullible public. They stirred up a continuous turmoil, and made
much trouble for the larger company, though their patent claims were
persistently defeated in the courts.

Most of the rival claimants who sprang up, once the telephone had
become an established fact and had proved its value, were men of
neither prominence nor scientific attainments. Of a very different
type was Elisha Gray, whose work we have before noticed, and who
now came forward with the claim that he had invented a telephone
in advance of Bell. Gray was a practical man of real scientific
attainments, but, as we have noticed, his efforts in search of a
telephone were from the viewpoint of a musical telegraph and so
destined to failure. It has frequently been stated that Gray filed
his application for a patent on a telephone of his invention but a
few minutes after Bell, and so Bell wrested the honor from him by the
scantiest of margins. A careful reading of the testimony brought out
in Gray's suit against Bell does not support such a statement. While
Bell filed an application for a patent on a completed, invention, Gray
filed, a few moments later, a caveat. This was a document, stating
that he hoped to invent a telephone of a certain kind therein stated,
and would serve to protect his rights until he should have time to
perfect it. Thus Gray did not have a completed invention, and he later
failed to perfect a telephone along the lines described in his caveat.
The decision of the court supported Bell's claims in full.

Another of the Western Union's telephone experts, Professor Dolbear,
of Tufts College, also sought to make capital of his knowledge of the
telephone. He based his claims upon an improvement of the Reis
musical telegraph, which had formed the starting-point for so many
experimenters. The case fell flat, however, for when the apparatus was
brought into court no one could make it talk.

None of the attacks upon Bell's claim to be the original inventor
of the telephone aroused more popular interest at the time than the
famous Drawbaugh case. Daniel Drawbaugh was a country mechanic with a
habit of reading of the new inventions in the scientific journals. He