Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone / A Biographical Sketch

by Silvanus P. Thompson

Mr. Edison, the inventor of the famous lamp-black button transmitter, which he christened later as “The Carbon Telephone,” has himself stated in his account of his inventions,[7] that he was started upon this line of investigation by having put into his hand, by the late Hon. Mr. W. Orton, a manuscript translation of Legat’s Report on Reis’s Telephone, given in the Journal of the Austro-German Telegraph Union (see Translation, p. 70). So that he was, therefore, aware at least of this: that in Reis’s instruments “single words uttered, as in reading, speaking, and the like, were perceptible indistinctly, nevertheless, here also the inflexions of the voice, the modulations of interrogation, exclamation, wonder, command, etc., attained distinct expression.” So far as Mr. Edison is concerned, therefore, Reis is his starting-point by his own direct avowal.

Professor Graham Bell has not failed to acknowledge his indebtedness to Reis, whose entry “into the field of telephonic research” he explicitly draws attention to by name, in his “Researches in Electric Telephony,” read before the American Academy of Sciences and Arts, in May 1876, and repeated almost verbatim before the Society of Telegraph Engineers, in November 1877. In the latter, as printed at the time, Professor Bell gave references to the researches of Reis, to the original paper in Dingler’s ‘Polytechnic Journal’ (see Translation, p. 61); to the particular pages of Kuhn’s volume in Karsten’s ‘Encyclopædia’ (see p. 106), in which diagrams and descriptions of two forms of Reis’s Telephone are given; and where mention is also made of the success with which exclamatory and other articulate intonations of the voice were transmitted by one of these instruments; and to Legat’s Report, mentioned above (and given in full on p. 70). Professor Bell has, moreover, in judicial examination before one of the United States Courts expressly and candidly stated,[8] that whilst the receivers of his own early tone-telephones were constructed so as to respond to one musical note only, the receiver of Reis’s instrument, shown in Legat’s Report (as copied in Prescott’s ‘Speaking Telephone,’ p. 10), and given on p. 109 of this work, was adapted to receive tones of any pitch, and not of one tone only. It is further important to note that in Professor Bell’s British Patent he does not lay claim to be the inventor, but only the improver of an invention: the exact title of his patent is, “Improvements in Electric Telephony (Transmitting or causing sounds for Telegraphing Messages) and Telephonic Apparatus.”

So far as Professor Bell is concerned, therefore, he is guiltless of stigmatising the Reis instrument as a mere “tone-telephone.”

Professor Dolbear, the inventor of the “Static Receiver” form of Telephone, is still more explicit in avowing Reis’s claim. In the report of his paper on “the Telephone,” read, March 1882, before the Society of Telegraph Engineers and of Electricians[9] we find: “The speaker could testify that the instrument would talk, and would talk well. The identical instruments employed by Reis would do that, so that Reis’s transmitters would transmit. Secondly, his receiver would receive; and Reis did transmit and receive articulate speech with such instruments.”

As far as Professor Dolbear is concerned, therefore, he admits in unequivocal terms the whole claim of Reis to be the inventor of The Telephone.

Count du Moncel, author of a work on the Telephone, which has run through several editions, though he has classified Reis’s instrument as a mere “tone-telephone,” has recently admitted[10] that he was, until the year 1882, ignorant of some of Reis’s instruments and of his original papers. He has, moreover, added these words: “Nevertheless, it would not be just not to acknowledge that the Reis Telephone formed the starting-point of all the others;” also these significant lines: “It is probable that in this matter, as in the greater number of modern inventions, the original inventor obtained only insignificant results, and that it was the man who first succeeded in arranging his apparatus so as to obtain really striking results that received the honour of the discovery and rendered it popular.”

So far as the Count du Moncel is concerned, therefore, the claims of Philipp Reis to be the inventor of the telephone are admitted, though hesitatingly, to be historically just.

We now return to the proof of the three points previously enunciated.

I.—Reis’s Telephone was expressly intended to transmit speech.

Reis’s first instrument was (see p. 16) nothing else than a model of the mechanism of the human ear. Why did he choose this fundamental type which runs through all his instruments from first to last? The reason is given in his own first memoir (p. 51), “How could a single instrument reproduce at once the total actions of all the organs operated in human speech? This was ever the cardinal question.” Reis constructed his instrument therefore with intent to reproduce human speech. For this reason he borrowed from the ear the suggestion of a tympanum. Of the operation of the tympanum he had the most exact and perfect conception. He says (p. 54), “Every tone, and every combination of tones”—and this includes articulate tones, of course, and is just as true of them as of any other kind—“evokes in our ear, if it enters it, vibrations of the drum-skin, the motions of which may be represented by a curve.” And further: “As soon, therefore, as it shall become possible, at any place and in any prescribed manner, to set up vibrations whose curves are like those of any given tone, or combination of tones, we shall then receive the same impression as that tone or combination of tones would have produced upon us.” Again, it is clear that his study of acoustics led him to employ the tympanum, because of its special value in responding to all the complex vibrations of human speech. It is no less significant that when a decade later Varley, Gray, and Bell, set themselves to invent tone-telephones for the purpose of multiple telegraphy, they abandoned tympanums as being unsuitable for tone-telephones, and in lieu thereof employed vibrating tongues like those of tuning-forks. Reis’s use of the tympanum had a very definite meaning then; it meant nothing less than this: I intend my instrument to transmit any sound that a human ear can hear. That it was explicitly within his intention to transmit speech is confirmed by another passage of his first memoir (p. 58), wherein he remarks with a shade of disappointment that though “the consonants are for the most part tolerably distinctly reproduced, the vowels are not yet to an equal degree.” To his own pupils and co-workers he communicated his ideas. One of the former, Mr. E. Horkheimer, now of Manchester, expressly says (see p. 117) that Reis’s intention was to transmit speech, and that the transmission of music was an afterthought adopted for the convenience of public exhibition, just as was the case with the public exhibitions of Bell’s Telephone fifteen years later.