Actually, they weren't. Elisha Gray filed what was called a patent caveat. . . not a patent application. A caveat was an old document that one could file with the patent office indicating that one INTENDED to file a patent in the future for a specified invention. it included drawings and description, but without claims, or proof of patentability. It expired after one year. Caveats were discontinued in 1909. A caveat does not carry the same weight as a patent application. Some argued that Gray had filed a caveat a month prior to Bell's Patent application and that Bell had bribed the examiner $100 to see Gray's patent and had stolen a key design element, the liquid modulator. However, since Gray's caveat was filed several hours after Bell's patent was filed, that is simply not possible.
There were actually EIGHT phone patents or caveats filed within a two week period. Sometimes technology just becomes ripe. . . when all things start coming together in science.
//Sometimes technology just becomes ripe. . . when all things start coming together in science.//
Perhaps...but I find it hard sometimes that some ideas or inventions come together just out of happenstance or coincidence! Humans can be inventive but I think some inspirations, motivations, or dreams of fancy come from sources just outside our ability to measure, observe or quantify. Why was the 18th thru the 21st century so different in terms of scientific advancement? Our earlier forbears had access to Greek and and other sources of knowledge. There are smart humans all thru history who could have made advances that could have taken their agrarian societies from dirt farming to the moon in less than 100 years....why just in the last 200 years and not back then?
I’ll tell you what I think.....”In the latter days I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh....”. Even if not all folks accept Christ as Saviour, the working genius of the Holy Spirit is working in the background to convict men of sin and to encourage those who are God’s children. Christians are salt but it is the Holy Spirit that carries our savor and influences even the learned men to create inventions that heal bodies and to fly to the moon and stars! It created the Judeo-Christian consensus that freed men’s minds to experiment with more freedom based constitutional systems. Ironically, while the belief in Jesus Christ is castigated as superstition, it was the widely held belief in Christ that created a new macro-cognitive awareness, a new societal paradigm that helped free men from superstition and fear of the grave that allowed the sciences to flourish! Helping the weak and sick, help the poor and needy, educating the uneducated, prison reforms; all of the exhortations of Jesus Christ, that to see him is to find him in the needs and frailties of others, have been written into the frame of western civilization. This warp and weft of traditions is what Satan and his deluded followers are now trying to unweave.