The origins can be traced back to 1876, when Elisha Gray lost his race to invent the telephone. Alexander Graham Bell put in a patent application just hours before Gray filed one. Gray nevertheless left his mark on the telephone industry in 1869 when he and Enos N. Barton formed Gray and Barton, a small manufacturing firm in Cleveland, Ohio. Three years later, the firm, now based in Chicago, was renamed the Western Electric Manufacturing Co. By 1880 it was the largest electrical manufacturing company in the US. A year later when growth of the telephone network was outstripping the capacity of smaller suppliers, American Bell purchased a controlling interest in Western Electric Company and made it the exclusive manufacturer of equipment for the Bell telephone companies. Western Electric Company was responsible for developing as well as manufacturing Bell equipment. In 1907, Theodore N. Vail combined the AT&T and Western Electric engineering departments into a single organization that became Bell Labs in 1925. Western Electric became the manufacturing arm of the Bell System.