Later the Bell Company bought Berliner's patent and took up his side of the case.

There was a seemingly endless succession of delays--fourteen years of the most vexatious delays--until finally the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that Berliner, and not Edison, was the original inventor of the transmitter.
From first to last, the transmitter has been the product of several minds.

Its basic idea is the varying of the electric current by varying the pressure between two points.

Bell unquestionably suggested it in his famous patent, when he wrote of "increasing and diminishing the resistance." Berliner was the first actually to construct one.

Edison greatly improved it by using soft carbon instead of a steel point.