Biography

Excerpt: "Marcellus Bailey was born in 1840 in Cincinnati, Ohio, and moved to Washington, D.C. with his family as a child. His father, Gameliel Bailey, was the editor of the National Era, a Washington, D.C.-based antislavery paper in which Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" first appeared. During the Civil War, Marcellus served as a major in the Union Army. When his army service ended, he enrolled in the Columbian College Law Department (now The George Washington University Law School), and graduated in its first class, in 1866. 

Upon graduation, Bailey began to practice patent law, a practice which continued for almost fifty-five years, up until a week before his death on January 16, 1921. At the time Alexander Graham Bell was working on the telephone, Bailey was practicing in a partnership with another patent attorney by the name of Anthony Pollok. The Alexander Graham Bell Papers collection at the Library of Congress contain a number of letters from Bell to Pollok and Bailey regarding the telephone patent. Bailey signed, not only the telephone patent, but three other Bell patents, including the patent for the multiple telegraph, No. 161,739, a pioneer patent in expanding transmission capacity by using different frequencies, which is a principle still in wide use in such applications as fiber optic communications and DSL internet service."