Bell had to fight hard in the courts to sustain his patent. Suit after suit was brought by rival claimants, attacking his right to the patent. The litigation was bitter and protracted. One of the most noteworthy of these suits was brought by a Pennsylvania mechanic named Drawbaugh. He claimed that about 1872 he had made a working telephone out of a cigar box, a glass tumbler, a tin can, and some other crude materials; and that with the apparatus thus constructed he had talked over a wire several hundred feet long. Many persons testified that they were acquainted with Drawbaugh's apparatus, some of them having used it. Some instruments, said to be the original ones which Drawbaugh had constructed, were brought into court and exhibited. It was shown that speech could be transmitted with them in a crude way. Drawbaugh claimed that he was too poor at the time of making the apparatus to take out the necessary patent. The Court decided in favor of Bell. Elisha Gray, whose application for a patent had been received the same day that Bell's was, also brought suit against Bell. Before making his application, Gray had filed some preliminary papers looking forward to a patent on the telephone. In his suit against Bell he charged that the patent examiner had fraudulently and secretly conveyed to Bell the contents of those papers. But Bell won this suit, and he finally established over all rivals his legal title as the inventor of the telephone. Recently a wireless system of telephoning has been in process of development, and it will not be strange if, within a few years, we shall be talking through space without wires, so boundless seem the possibilities of the age. CHAPTER V ELECTRICITY: LIGHTING, TRANSPORTATION, AND OTHER USES Man must have discovered artificial light as soon as he discovered fire, for the two exist together. The first light was probably produced by burning sticks or pieces of wood. In his search for more light, man learned how to make the tallow candle. Lights made in one form or other from the fats of animals persisted almost to the threshold of the present. The next step forward was to the use of oil; and the next, to the use of gas. The first practical use of gas for purposes of illumination was in 1792. In that year William Murdoch, an English engineer, produced gas artificially from coal, and with it lighted his house in Cornwall, a county of England. Nine years afterward a Frenchman named Lebon illuminated his house and garden in Paris with gas produced from wood. Street lighting by gas was introduced in 1807 by an Englishman named F. A. Winzer or Windsor, in Pall Mall, one of the fine streets of London. The first gas lights in America were installed in 1806 by David Melville, of Newport, Rhode Island, in his residence and in the streets adjacent. Baltimore was the first city in the United States to adopt gas lighting for its streets. This was in 1817.