| Synthesizer creator |
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Synthesizers were made known to the broad public by some exceptional artists and musicians that entered our world sometimes in the late sixties and early seventies and brought to us sound worlds unheard before. The immediate popularity of synthesizers with musicians and the music consumers was long lasting, even today there are not many popular music productions where synthesizers are not used at least in the background arrangements. While many synthesizer keyboards have gained fame and many people know about the distinctive sound of a particular instrument, it is not very widely known that an engineer who believed that Alexander Graham Bell stole his idea of the telephone invented the electric synthesizer as a byproduct of his research back in the nineteenth century. Elisha Gray, an electrical engineer and co-founder of the Western Electric Manufacturing Company, is the man who invented the variable resistance telephone. The incident where Bell managed to obtain early drafts outlined by Gray in order to finalize his, up until that moment unemployable concept, is still a matter of heated discussions. Needless to say, Bell apparently used Gray's refinements to finalize his patent and used his connections within the patent office to be recognized as the
first person that invented the telephone, something Bell vehemently denied, but Gray persisted in until the day he died. Elisha Gray was a son of a Quaker family in Ohio who grew up on a farm. His talents were apparent, when the Oberlin College hired him to teach electricity and science, despite not having graduated. He built and invented most of the laboratory equipment that was used in Oberlin's science departments. He worked his whole life and secured over seventy patents to his name, including the musical telegraph, which was able to transmit musical tones through conventional telegraph wires. The oscillator tones were made audible by a simple contraption that worked as a loudspeaker, and the first ever synthesizer was created. Many other synthesizer manufacturers and ideators, including Robert Moog, Wolfgang Palm of the PPG and Waldorf fame, Jon Appleton, vital for the invention of Synclavier, Peter Vogel, responsible for the Fairlight CMI, Dave Smith of the Sequential Circuits and many more such important people for the development of synthesizers, all of them are indebted to the talented man who never received a written biography. While the whole world hailed and still does hail Robert Moog as the inventor of the modern synthesizer, which he and Don Buchla actually made available for musicians, but did not invent, the core basics of all analog synthesizers went back to the original design made by Elisha Gray. |
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