Daniel Drawbaugh: The Man Bell Telephone Beat in Court

Born in this village on July fourteenth, eighteen twenty-seven, Daniel Drawbaugh spent his life tinkering in a small workshop in rural Cumberland County. Neighbors later testified that he had shown them a working telephone device years before Alexander Graham Bell filed his famous patent. When Drawbaugh sought his own patent in eighteen eighty, Bell Telephone took him to court.

The legal battle reached the Supreme Court. In eighteen eighty-eight the Court sided with Bell, but not by much: three justices dissented, noting the weight of local testimony in Drawbaugh's favor. The dissent called him a credible inventor whose poverty had prevented him from filing sooner. History handed the credit to Bell, and Drawbaugh faded into obscurity. He moved to Camp Hill in nineteen oh four and died there on November second, nineteen eleven, one of history's closer calls.