J. Harris Rogers isn’t a household name, but he nearly was. For a brief period in the late 19th century, the Bladensburg inventor was a top rival to Alexander Graham Bell in the race to turn the telephone into a money-making business.

The son of an Episcopal preacher from Tennessee, Rogers became interested in the question of how to send audio over a wire while studying at Princeton.

After graduation, he was appointed chief electrician of the U.S. Capitol building and continued his experiments on the side, filing several patents related to telephony.

Sensing an opportunity, his father, James Webb Rogers, bought a large house on a hill overlooking Bladensburg that he called the Parthenon to be used as a laboratory for his son’s experiments and started a business called the Pan-Electric Telephone Company.

The elder Rogers was a divisive figure, “variously described as a crank, an eccentric, a visionary, and a man of culture,” according to one historian. After his first attempt using money from Wall Street failed, he turned to his political contacts.

Tennessee Senator Isham Harris, a longtime friend of Rogers, was first to sign on. Various other political figures, including a former Confederate general, two former House members and members of President Grover Cleveland’s Cabinet soon joined in.

Rogers tried to recruit other members of Congress, too, even going so far as to send them letters and poems and show up at their offices.

The company, meantime, began organizing local phone companies using equipment built with designs from J. Harris Rogers’ patents, which in theory meant they weren’t running afoul of Bell’s wide-ranging patents for the phone. An electrician for Bell even said at one point that the Pan-Electric phone was a better design.

But Bell sued in Pennsylvania and won, and the threat of more lawsuits kept Pan-Electric from expanding into other states. Rogers convinced the Cleveland administration to launch its own lawsuit against Bell’s patents, which quickly became politicized.

The legal effort failed when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Bell, and Rogers’ erratic political influence operation gave an unseemly air to the challenge, which was described by Cleveland’s opponents as a scandal.

Pan-Electric was dissolved in 1886, and “Ma Bell” went on to become the dominant telephone monopoly.

But during its long legal and political fight, Rogers and his son brought to light good evidence that Alexander Graham Bell’s patents were overly broad and his design derivative of other people’s inventions.

Their arguments that Bell was an unfair monopoly, meantime, eventually won out nearly a century later when a federal judge ordered the Bell system be broken up.

J. Harris Rogers’ went on to invent hundreds of other machines including one used for underwater communication by the Navy.

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