How to HOLD the business that had been established--that was now the problem. None of the Bell partners had been mere stock-jobbers. At one time they had even taken a pledge not to sell any of their stock to outsiders. They had financed their company in a most honest and simple way; and they were desperately opposed to the financial banditti whose purpose was to transform the telephone business into a cheat and a gamble. At first, having held their own against the Western Union, they expected to make short work of the stock-jobbers. But it was a vain hope. These bogus companies, they found, did not fight in the open, as the Western Union had done. All manner of injurious rumors were presently set afloat concerning the Bell patent. Other inventors--some of them honest men, and some shameless pretenders--were brought forward with strangely concocted tales of prior invention. The Granger movement was at that time a strong political factor in the Middle West, and its blind fear of patents and "monopolies" was turned aggressively against the Bell Company. A few Senators and legitimate capitalists were lifted up as the figureheads of the crusade. And a loud hue-and-cry was raised in the newspapers against "high rates and monopoly" to distract the minds of the people from the real issue of legitimate business versus stock-company bubbles. The most plausible and persistent of all the various inventors who snatched at Bell's laurels, was Elisha Gray. He refused to abide by the adverse decision of the court. Several years after his defeat, he came forward with new weapons and new methods of attack. He became more hostile and irreconcilable; and until his death, in 1901, never renounced his claim to be the original inventor of the telephone. The reason for this persistence is very evident. Gray was a professional inventor, a highly competent man who had begun his career as a blacksmith's apprentice, and risen to be a professor of Oberlin. He made, during his lifetime, over five million dollars by his patents. In 1874, he and Bell were running a neck-and-neck race to see who could first invent a musical telegraph--when, presto! Bell suddenly turned aside, because of his acoustical knowledge, and invented the telephone, while Gray kept straight ahead. Like all others who were in quest of a better telegraph instrument, Gray had glimmerings of the possibility of sending speech by wire, and by one of the strangest of coincidences he filed a caveat on the subject on the SAME DAY that Bell filed the application for a patent. Bell had arrived first. As the record book shows, the fifth entry on that day was: "A. G. Bell, $15"; and the thirty-ninth entry was "E. Gray, $10."