Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone / A Biographical Sketch

by Silvanus P. Thompson

Hæmorrhage of the lungs and a loss of voice, which eventually became almost total, intervened to incapacitate him for work, and especially from working with the telephone. In 1873 he disposed of all his instruments and tools to Garnier’s Institute. To Herr Garnier he made the remark that he had showed the world the way to a great invention, which must now be left to others to develop. At last the end came. The annual Report of Garnier’s Institute for the academic year 1873-1874 contains the following brief notice of the decease and labours of Philipp Reis:—

“At first active in divers subjects of instruction, he soon concentrated his whole faculties upon instruction in Natural Science, the subject in which his entire thought and work lay. Witnesses of this are not only all they who learned to know him in Frankfort, in the period when he was preparing for his vocation as teacher, but also his colleagues at the Institute, his numerous pupils, and the members of the Naturalists’ Association (Naturforscher Versammlung) at Giessen, who, recognising his keen insight, his perseverance and his rich gifts, encouraged him to further investigations in his newly propounded theories. To the Association at Giessen he brought his Telephone. To the Association at Wiesbaden, in September 1872, he intended to exhibit a new ingeniously constructed gravity-machine, but his state of health made it impossible. This had become such during several years, that he was enabled to discharge the duties of his post only by self-control of a special, and, as is generally admitted, unusual nature; and the practice of his vocation became more difficult when his voice also failed. In the summer of 1873 he was obliged, during several weeks, to lay aside his teaching. As by this rest and that of the autumn vacation an improvement in his condition occurred, he acquired new hopes of recovery, and resumed his teaching in October with his customary energy. But it was only the last flickering up of the expiring lamp of life. Pulmonary consumption, from which he had long suffered, laid him in December upon the sickbed, from which after long and deep pains, at five o’clock in the afternoon, on the 14th of January, 1874, he was released by death.”

The closing words of his autobiographical notes, or “curriculum vitæ,” as he himself styled them, were the following:—

“As I look back upon my life I can indeed say with the Holy Scriptures that it has been ‘labour and sorrow.’ But I have also to thank the Lord that He has given me His blessing in my calling and in my family, and has bestowed more good upon me than I have known how to ask of Him. The Lord has helped hitherto; He will help yet further.”

In 1877, when the Magneto-Telephones of Graham Bell began to make their way into Europe, the friends of Philipp Reis were not slow to reclaim for their deceased comrade the honours due to him. In December 1877, as the columns of the Neue Frankfurter Presse show, a lecture was given upon the history of the Telephone, at the Free German Institute, in Frankfort, by Dr. Volger, its President, the same who in 1863 had shown the Telephone to the Emperor of Austria. On that occasion the Telephone of Reis’s own construction, presented by him to the Institute after his exhibition of it in 1862, was shown.

Early in 1878 a subscription was raised by members of the Physical Society of Frankfort for the purpose of erecting a monument to the memory of their former colleague. This monument, bearing a portrait medallion, executed by the sculptor, Carl Rumpf, was duly inaugurated on Sunday, December 8, 1878, when an appropriate address was pronounced by the late Dr. Fleck, of Frankfort. The ‘Jahresbericht,’ of the Physical Society for 1877-78 (p. 44), contains the following brief record:—

“The Society has erected to the memory of its former member, the inventor of the Telephone, Philipp Reis (deceased in 1874), teacher, of Friedrichsdorf (see ‘Jahresbericht,’ 1860-61, pp. 57-64; and 1861-62, p. 13), in the cemetery of that place, a monument which was inaugurated on the 8th of December, 1878. This monument, an obelisk of red sandstone, bears in addition to the dedication, a well-executed medallion portrait of Philipp Reis, modelled by the sculptor, A. C. Rumpf, and executed galvanoplastically by G. v. Kress.”

The inscription on Reis’s monument in the Friedrichsdorf Cemetery is:—