The Swiss inventor Gustav Adolf Hasler (1830-1900) described in 1873 a ‘Pantographe éléctrique,’ an electric pantograph which transmitted the movement of a pen over a telegraph connection. Pantograph is a collective term describing any device that duplicates writing or drawing through a series of connected mechanical arms. Hasler’s invention, however, was intended to duplicate at-a-distance, more precisely between a telegraphic transmitter and receiver. The device does not appear to have been commercially used.

In 1878, Edward A. Cowper was granted a patent in England for an ‘autographic telegraph.’ Subsequently, he applied for a patent in the U.S., where he described the workings of his invention:

In operating according to my invention the pen or other style is held in the hand of the operator writing, who writes upon a strip of paper that is caused to travel steadily under his pen […]. The pen or other style is connected by two light connecting-rods (or it may be by threads, if springs are added to keep the threads always tight) to the contact apparatus for sending the currents of the required strengths. […] I claim the method of effecting at a receiving-station the reproduction of characters written or marked at a sending-station, by means of electric currents varied in force by the movements of the sending style or tracer so as to produce correspondingly-varied movements of the receiving style or tracer.

These mechanisms generally seem similar to the ones realized by Elisha Gray ten years later. Both science magazines and newspapers reported about Cowper’s machine at the time.

In 1885, James H. Robertson applied for a patent for an autographic telegraph. Robertson filed several more patents pertaining to this invention over the next ten years. He was reportedly unaware of Cowper’s device when he started working on his own. In his patents, Robertson is described as the ‘assignor to the Writing Telegraph Company of New York.’ In an advertisement in 1888, a crucial year in Gray’s telautograph project, the Writing Telegraph Co. was looking for investors: “This company owns controlling patents in all prominent countries. […] Having perfected its instruments, it is ready to extend its business, not only for the distributing of news, but for private lines and the establishing of exchanges similar to those of the telephone.” Robertson and Gray, then, appear to have been in a head-to-head race, both in patenting and in developing a business for their inventions.