Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History

by Andrew Carroll

About half a dozen European and American inventors, for instance, patented the incandescent lightbulb years before Thomas Edison. One of them, John Starr from Ohio, is believed to have beaten Edison by decades. Electrical engineer Elisha Gray submitted his telephone patent several hours before Alexander Graham Bell’s attorney handed in Bell’s application on February 14, 1876, but Bell became the more famous of the two. Gray’s defenders argue that he lost out because an alcoholic Patent Office employee was bribed to ensure that Bell’s claim received priority. (Bell was also accused of later coming to the patent office himself, perusing Gray’s application, and then stealing concepts he later incorporated into his own design.) And more than two years before the Wright brothers briefly dipped and bobbed over the sands of Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, the Bridgeport Herald profiled a German-born immigrant named Gustave Whitehead who, according to the article, flew a motor-propelled airplane in Fairfield, Connecticut. Several witnesses later signed affidavits swearing that they, too, witnessed the August 1901 flight. Whitehead could have settled the question and possibly earned his chance at immortality had he, like the Wright brothers, captured his flight on film. (The true inventor of photography is also, of course, a matter of debate.)