A patent was granted to Bell in March 1876. Therefore when, a few weeks later, Bell was called to explain the similarities of his patent to one he had been granted a year earlier for a harmonic telegraph, it is suggested that he was able to use inside information to persuade the examiner that his was a new device – the telephone. However, it was discovered in a Congressional inquiry 10 years later that an official from the Patent Office had informed Bell's lawyers of the content of Gray's caveat rather than just of its existence. On the one hand, it could be said that Bell was displaying the self-confidence needed by any inventor. Gray chose to register his detailed specification as an incomplete invention, while Bell registered his partial specification as a complete invention. The US patent system of the time didn't require inventors to produce a working prototype. In fact Gray's idea was sounder in concept than Bell's (including using liquid in the transmitter, an idea that Bell later adopted, some say copied), and Gray's intentions were clearer, but he hadn't built a working prototype either. Although Bell had built a prototype, it wasn't a working telephone system, and while his early devices worked as receivers they never worked well as transmitters. But Gray's caveat declared that the main purpose of his device was ‘to transmit the tones of the human voice through a telegraphic circuit and reproduce them at the receiving end of the line, so that actual conversations can be carried on by persons at long distances apart’. Bell's patent description had sound transmission as a minor purpose. Gray was the co-owner and chief scientist of a company that manufactured telegraphic equipment. The two most significant players in the invention of a practical working telephone were Bell and Elisha Gray. The popular image of Bell inventing the telephone, while it has some truth, is by no means the whole story.
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