These bogus companies, they found, did not fight in the open, as the Western Union had done.
All manner of injurious rumors were presently set afloat concerning the Bell patent.

Other inventors--some of them honest men, and some shameless pretenders--were brought forward with strangely concocted tales of prior invention.

The Granger movement was at that time a strong political factor in the Middle West, and its blind fear of patents and "monopolies" was turned aggressively against the Bell Company.

A few Senators and legitimate capitalists were lifted up as the figureheads of the crusade.

And a loud hue-and-cry was raised in the newspapers against "high rates and monopoly" to distract the minds of the people from the real issue of legitimate business versus stock-company bubbles.
The most plausible and persistent of all the various inventors who snatched at Bell's laurels, was Elisha Gray.