No patent has ever been submitted to such determined assault from every direction as Bell's; and no inventor has ever been more completely vindicated.

Bell was the first inventor, and Gray was not." After Gray, the weightiest challenger who came against Bell was Professor Amos E.Dolbear, of Tufts College.

He, like Gray, had written a letter of applause to Bell in 1877.

"I congratulate you, sir," he said, "upon your very great invention, and I hope to see it supplant all forms of existing telegraphs, and that you will be successful in obtaining the wealth and honor which is your due." But one year later, Dolbear came to view with an opposition telephone.

It was not an imitation of Bell's, he insisted, but an improvement upon an electrical device made by a German named Philip Reis, in 1861.
Thus there appeared upon the scene the so-called "Reis telephone," which was not a telephone at all, in any practical sense, but which served well enough for nine years or more as a weapon to use against the Bell patents.