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Updated: May 21, 2025
Daniel Drawbaugh was a country mechanic with a habit of reading of the new inventions in the scientific journals. He would work out models of many of these for himself, and, showing them very proudly, often claim them as his own devices. Drawbaugh was now put forward by the opponents of the Bell organization as having invented a telephone before Bell.
It is said that a very ingenious American, named Drawbaugh, had anticipated all the inventors of every part of the telephone system; that he had invented a receiver before Bell; that he had invented the compressed carbon arrangement before Edison; that he had invented the microphone before our friend Professor Hughes; and that, in fact, he had done everything on the face of the earth to establish the claims set forth.
The First Telephone Exchange The Bell Telephone Association Theodore N. Vail The Fight with the Western Union Edison and Blake Invent Transmitters Last Effort of the Western Union Mushroom Companies and Would-be Inventors The Controversy with Gray Dolbear's Claims The Drawbaugh Case On a Firm Footing.
They next planned to get through politics what they could not get through law; they induced the Government to bring suit for the annulment of the Bell patents. It was a bold and desperate move, and enabled the promoters of paper companies to sell stock for several years longer. The whole dispute was re-opened, from Gray to Drawbaugh.
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.
Several years later this same man attempted to defraud a leading firm of manufacturing chemists in New York, and was sent to State prison. A short time after that a syndicate took up a man named Goebel and tried to do the same thing, but again our detective-work was too much for them. This was along the same line as the attempt of Drawbaugh to deprive Bell of his telephone.
This comic opera phase came to a head in the famous Drawbaugh case, which lasted for nearly four years, and filled ten thousand pages with its evidence. Having failed on Reis, the German, the opponents of Bell now brought forward an American inventor named Daniel Drawbaugh, and opened up a noisy newspaper campaign.
Five hundred witnesses were examined; and such a general turmoil was aroused that the Bell lawyers were compelled to take the attack seriously, and to fight back with every pound of ammunition they possessed. The fact about Drawbaugh is that he was a mechanic in a country village near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
To secure public sympathy for Drawbaugh, it was said that he had invented a complete telephone and switchboard before 1876, but was in such "utter and abject poverty" that he could not get himself a patent.
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