“In reply to your favour of 31st instant, I shall be very happy to give you all the information I can with respect to the telephonic experiments of my late friend and teacher Mr. Philipp Reis. I would express my gratification at finding that you are trying to put my old teacher’s claims on their just basis. I have always felt that in this race for telephonic fame, his claims have been very coolly put aside or ignored. That he did invent the Telephone there is not the remotest doubt. I was, I think, a great favourite of his; and at the time his assumption was that I was destined for a scientific career, either as a physicist or a chemist; and I believe that he said more to me about the telephone than to any one; and I assisted him in most of his experiments prior to the spring of 1862.
“Philipp Reis intended to transmit speech by his telephone—this was his chief aim; the transmitting of musical tones being only an after-thought, worked out for the convenience of public exhibition (which took place at the Physical Society at Frankfort-on-the-Main). I myself spent considerable time with him in transmitting words through the instruments. We never (in my time) got the length of transmitting complete sentences successfully, but certain words, such as ‘Wer da?’ ‘gewiss,’ ‘warm,’ ‘kalt,’ were undoubtedly transmitted without previous arrangement. I believe Reis made similar experiments with his brother-in-law.
Fig. 35.
Fig. 36.
“I recollect the instrument in the shape of the human ear very well: it was Reis’s earliest form of transmitter. The transmitter underwent a great many changes, even during my time. The form you sketch ([Fig. 9], p. 20) was almost the oldest one, and was soon superseded by the funnel-shape ([Fig. 35]). The back was always closed by a tympanum of bladder, and many a hundred bladders were stretched, torn, and discarded during his experiments. I recollect him stating to me that he thought a very thin metal tympanum would eventually become the proper thing, and one was actually tried, coated over on one side with shellac, and on the other likewise, except at the point of contact ([Fig. 36]). I believe it was made of very thin brass, but at the time the experiments were not satisfactory. Talc was also tried, but without success, the platinum contacts being in all cases preserved.