Inventor of IC (Integrated Circuit)

In 1926 in Scotland, John Logie Baird demonstrated a machine that transmits movie pictures using radio technology, calling it a "televisor." It was based on a 1884 idea by German Paul Nipkow. At the same time, Philo Fansworth was toiling away in San Francisco on his concept for television. The two men met a few months later, and Baird had to agree that Farnsworth's electronic design was the better. They weren't the only ones working on a TV model, though. Vladmir Zworykin, a Russian immigrant to New York, was working on athode-ray tubes, with the backing of David Sarnoff, the tech-savvy marketer who started NBC. In 1928, Farnsworth's television sets made it to the market first, at $75 a piece.

Gray invented the first electronic musical instrument. He had accidentally discovered that he could control sound from a self-vibrating electromagnetic circuit and in doing so invented a basic single note oscillator. The "Musical Telegraph" used steel reeds whose oscillations were created and transmitted over a telephone line by electromagnets. At the same time, around 1874, Bell had also designed an experimental "Electric Harp" for speech transmission over a telephone line using similar technology to Gray's.

One hour before Alexander Graham Bell registered his patent for the telephone in 1876, Elisha Gray patented his design. After years of litigation, the patent went to Bell.