Elisha Gray Quotes

Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?

I have been so constantly under the necessity of watching the movements of the most unprincipled set of pirates I have ever known, that all my time has been occupied in defense, in putting evidence into something like legal shape that I am the inventor of the Electro-Magnetic Telegraph.

America—not Britain—has a use for the telephone. Here we have a superabundance of messengers, errand boys, and things of that kind.

One of the most powerful scientific tools ever invented is the telephone.

What Alexander Graham Bell thought up occupied less space than a flower vase. Now it's so small that I have to search all my pockets to discover I've received a spam text.

23 other inventors created electric incandescent light bulbs prior to Thomas Edison. Edison is renowned primarily because he was the first to figure out the business model of electric lighting. Simultaneous independent invention is the norm, true for minor as well as major leaps like calculus, steam engines and the transistor. […] If Alexander Graham Bell had not secured the patent for inventing the telephone, Elisha Gray would have gotten it because they both applied for the telephone patent on the same day (Feb 14, 1876).

Where a new invention promises to be useful, it ought to be tried.

Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.

Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success.

Intellectual Ventures is a company that invests in invention.

E-mail is far more convenient than the telephone, as far as I'm concerned. I would throw my phone away if I could get away with it.

The radio was an improvement on the telegraph but it didn't have the same exponential, transformative effect.

I spent much of my life dying for somebody to help me even file for a patent or make a prototype. I understand that.

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.

A man with an invention on which he has spent his life, but has no means to get it developed for the good of humanity - or even patented for himself - must feel the pinch of poverty very acutely.

I think about the automobile, I think about like, when I was a kid, you know, the invention of the answering machine, which I was like, 'Wow.' Or call waiting, which was, like, very big. It was a very big thing. Call waiting was a very big thing. And these incremental innovations happen constantly.

In the old days when people invented a new function they had something useful in mind.

I am a maker of useful things.

If you invent something, you're doing a creative act. It's like writing a novel or composing music. You put your heart and soul into it, and money. It's years of your life, it's your house remortgaged, huge emotional investment and financial investment.

Velcro: what a rip-off.

In 1854 I took out a patent for puddling iron by means of steam.

A patent, or invention, is any assemblage of technologies or ideas that you can put together that nobody put together that way before. That's how the patent office defines it. That's an invention.

My company invents all kinds of new technology in lots of different areas. And we do that for a couple of reasons. We invent for fun - invention is a lot of fun to do - and we also invent for profit. The two are related because the profit actually takes long enough that if it isn't fun, you wouldn't have the time to do it.

I consider high-speed data transmission an invention that became a major innovation. It changed the way we all communicate.

Science - or the products of science like technology - is just a way of achieving something real, something that happens, something that works.