PARIS – Part of the legacy of a 1903 Paris High School graduate who left almost $275 million to two universities in the Boston area may come full circle back to his hometown.

Frank Currier Doble, founder of the Doble Engineering Company in Massachusetts, passed away in 1969, leaving $272 million in a trust that was recently dissolved after the sale of his company. The money was divided equally between Tufts University, where he graduated with a degree in electrical engineering in 1911, and Lesley University, where he served as a trustee. The gift, the largest in the history of Tufts and Lesley universities, was recently announced by the two universities.

Both universities had previously received $34 million each in dividends from the trusts, according to information from Tufts University.

“They got $300 million. We were hoping they would do a scholarship,” said Selectmen Chairman Bill Damon, whose wife Beatrice was Doble’s cousin.

Tufts has already announced it intends to spend millions on the development of an interdisciplinary laboratory at Tufts University in Medford, but Beatrice Damon said she would like some of the money put aside for a scholarship to benefit a Paris student going on to study electrical engineering.

“That’s where he grew up,” she said of the reason she would like to see a Paris student be a recipient of a Doble scholarship.

Doble founded Doble Engineering in 1920 with his first invention of a 7.5 pound portable telephone that enabled utility field engineers in remote regions to communicate with distant colleagues safely through high-voltage transmission, according to information from university officials.

Eventually his firm went worldwide, developing instruments and services that made the delivery of electricity safer and more efficient.

Doble was born in 1886 in Paris and graduated from Paris High School in 1903.

According to “Doble Tested,” the corporate history published on the company’s 75th anniversary in 1995, Doble spent his early years “pondering a future in one of the exciting new industries of the day: automobiles or electric power. By 1905 he had made up his mind, beginning a two-year apprenticeship with a Lawrence electrician. In 1907, he began his undergraduate study at Tufts College, financed at least in part by labor – he wired the campus for telephone service during his studies.”

From there the career of the technology pioneer took off.

Eleanor Eddy, a former fellow Lesley corporator with Doble and retired director at Doble Engineering, said that Doble’s commitment to Lesley stemmed from his belief in quality early education as necessary to the furtherance of scientific study in higher education.

“He often cited his belief that preparation for college begins in the first grade,” said Eddy in a statement released by Lesley University. “Lesley in the 1950s and 1960s could have had no more devoted supporter for its principal mission at the time, teacher preparation.”

Beatrice Damon said she doesn’t recall too much about Doble. Her father, Doble’s uncle, passed away when she was only 13.

“Not really. I was a lot younger than he was. But I used to go up there as a child with my mother and father,” said Damon of her visits to Doble’s home in Methuen, Mass.

While she was aware that Doble had amassed a lot of money, she did not know the exact amount. “We knew the company was worth a lot of money,” she said.

No information was available Thursday on the status of the scholarship request, said Kim Thurber, a spokesman at Tufts University.