In the winter of 1854-5 we find him most zealously busied with preparations for carrying out his decision to become a teacher. In 1855, he went through his year of military service at Cassel. Returning to Frankfort, he worked away with his customary and marvellous energy, attended lectures on mathematics and the sciences, worked in the laboratory, and studied books on Pedagogy. “Thus prepared, I set my mind on going to Heidelberg in order to put the finishing touch to my education as teacher. I wanted to settle down in Frankfort in this capacity, and undertake instruction in mathematics and science in the various schools. Then in the spring of 1858, I visited my former master, Hofrath Garnier, in whom I had ever found a fatherly friend. When I disclosed to him my intentions and prospects, he offered me a post in his Institute. Partly gratitude and attachment, and partly the ardent desire to make myself right quickly useful, induced me to accept the proffered post.”
In the autumn of the year 1858 he returned to Friedrichsdorf, and in September 1859 he married and founded his peaceful home.
Until Easter, 1859, he had but few lessons to give; that he utilised every moment of his spare time most conscientiously in earnest activity and sound progress is nothing more than was to be expected from what has been said above.
It was during this time that Reis undertook the first experimental researches of an original nature. Working almost alone, and without any scientific guide, he was led into lines of thought not previously trodden. He had conceived an idea that electrical forces could be propagated across space without any material conductor in the same way as light is propagated. He made many experiments on the subject, the precise nature of which can never now be known, but in which a large concave mirror was employed in conjunction with an electroscope and a source of electrification. The results which he obtained he embodied in a paper, of which no trace now remains, bearing as its title ‘On the Radiation of Electricity.’ This paper he sent in 1859 to Professor Poggendorff for insertion in Poggendorff’s well-known ‘Annalen der Physik.’ Greatly to his disappointment the memoir was not accepted by Professor Poggendorff. Its rejection was a great blow to the sensitive and highly strung temperament of the young teacher; and as will be seen was not without its consequences.
The other piece of original work undertaken at this time was the research which resulted in his great invention—the Telephone. From the brief biographical notes written by the lamented inventor in 1868 we extract the following:—
“Incited thereto by my lessons in Physics in the year 1860, I attacked a work begun much earlier concerning the organs of hearing, and soon had the joy to see my pains rewarded with success, since I succeeded in inventing an apparatus, by which it is possible to make clear and evident the functions of the organs of hearing, but with which also one can reproduce tones of all kinds at any desired distance by means of the galvanic current. I named the instrument ‘Telephon.’ The recognition of me on so many sides, which has taken place in consequence of this invention, especially at the Naturalists’ Association (Versammlung Deutscher Naturforscher) at Giessen, has continually helped to quicken my ardour for study, that I may show myself worthy of the luck that has befallen me.”
His earliest telephones were made by his own hands, in a little workshop behind his house, whence he laid on wires into an upper room. He also carried a wire from the physical cabinet of Garnier’s Institute across the playground into one of the class-rooms for experimental telephonic communication; and a firmly established tradition of the school is still preserved, that the boys were afraid of making a noise in that class-room for fear Herr Reis should hear them in his place amongst his favourite instruments.
In 1862 Reis sent once again to Professor Poggendorff a memoir, this time on the Telephone. This, in spite of the advocacy of Professor Böttger and of Professor Müller of Freiburg, both of whom wrote, was declined by Professor Poggendorff, who treated the transmission of speech by electricity as a myth. Reis, who was convinced that the rejection was because he was “only a poor schoolmaster,” was more deeply pained than ever.
Of the various public exhibitions of the Telephone given by Reis in the years 1861 to 1864, much will be found in the latter part of this book in which the contemporary notices are reprinted. The first public lecture was in 1861, before the Physical Society of Frankfort (see p. 50), the last the above-mentioned occasion at Giessen (see p. 93) in 1864. By this time Reis’s invention was becoming widely known. In addition to his own lectures on the subject, the Telephone had been the subject of lectures in various parts of Germany. It was lectured upon by Professor Buff in Giessen twice, by Professor Böttger both in Frankfort and in Stettin; by Professor H. Pick, by Professor Osann of Würtzburg, by Professor Paul Reis of Mainz, and by others. In 1863 Reis’s Telephone was shown by Dr. Otto Volger, Founder and President of the Free German Institute (Freies Deutsches Hochstift), to the Emperor of Austria and to King Max of Bavaria, then on a visit to Frankfort.
Telephones were being sent to various parts of the world. They were to be found in the Physical Laboratories of Munich, Erlangen, Wiesbaden, Vienna, and Cologne. They were sent to distant parts of the world, to London,[1] to Dublin, to Tiflis in the Caucasus. In Manchester, before the Literary and Philosophical Society, Reis’s Telephone was shown in 1865 by Professor Clifton, who, however, from not having Reis’s own original memoirs on the subject before him, utterly mistook—if the Journal of Proceedings be not in error—the nature of the instrument, and not knowing the theory of vibration of the tympanum so beautifully demonstrated by Reis, imagined the instrument to be a mere harmonic telegraph for transmitting code signals in fixed musical tones! Telephones, too, were becoming an article of commerce and, good and bad,[2] were being bought for the purpose of placing them in collections of scientific apparatus. The invention was, however, too soon for the world. To Reis’s great disappointment, the Physical Society of Frankfort took no further notice of the invention, the lustre of which shone upon them. He resigned his membership in the Society in October 1867. The Free German Institute of Frankfort, to which Reis had next betaken himself, though electing him to the dignity of honorary membership, left the invention aside as a philosophic toy. The Naturalists’ Assembly, including all the leading scientific men of Germany, had indeed welcomed him at Giessen; but too late. The sensitive temperament had met with too many rebuffs, and the fatal disease with which he was already stricken told upon his energies. In particular the rejection of his earlier researches had preyed upon his disposition. It is narrated by eye-witnesses still living, how, after his successful lecture on the Telephone at Giessen, Reis was asked by Professor Poggendorff, who was present, to write an account of his instrument for insertion in the ‘Annalen,’ to which request Reis’s reply was: “Ich danke Ihnen recht sehr, Herr Professor; es ist zu spät. Jetzt will ich nicht ihn schicken. Mein Apparat wird ohne Beschreibung in den Annalen bekannt werden.”