FOOTNOTES:
[1] An autograph letter of Philipp Reis to Mr. W. Ladd, the well-known instrument maker of Beak Street, London, describing his telephone, is still preserved, and is now in possession of the Society of Telegraph Engineers and Electricians of London. It is reproduced at p. 81.
[2] As to the difference in quality of the instruments, see the testimony of the maker, Albert of Frankfort, on p. 44. Prof. Pisko (see p. 101) seems to have had a peculiarly imperfect instrument.
[3] Dr. Messel, F.C.S., a former pupil of Reis, and an eye-witness of his early experiments, makes, in a letter to Professor W. F. Barrett, the following very interesting statement: “The original telephone was of a most primitive nature. The transmitting instrument was a bung of a beer-barrel hollowed out, and a cone formed in this way was closed with the skin of a German sausage, which did service as a membrane. To this was fixed with a drop of sealing-wax a little strip of platinum corresponding to the hammer of the ear, and which closed or opened the electric circuit, precisely as in the instruments of a later date. The receiving instrument was a knitting needle surrounded with a coil of wire and placed on a violin to serve as a sounding board. It astonished every one quite as much as the more perfect instruments of Bell now do. The instrument I have described has now passed into the hands of the Telegraph Department of the German Government.” [The instrument now in the museum of the Reichs Post-Amt in Berlin is not this, but is the first of the “Improved” Telephones described later by Reis in his “Prospectus” (see p. 85), and is stamped “Philipp Reis,” “1863,” “No. 1.”] S.P.T.
[4] Or sometimes “tension-regulators,” though the latter term is acknowledged by most competent electricians to be indescriptive and open to objection.
[5] See Die Geschichte und Entwickelung des Elektrischen Fernsprechwesens (issued officially from the Imperial German Post-office, 1880), p. 7.
[6] The name “Telephone” had already been applied by Sir C. Wheatstone (1831) to an acoustic arrangement for transmitting sounds through wooden rods to a distant place in a purely mechanical manner. It is needless to observe that speech as well as music can be thus transmitted; and though Wheatstone gave telephonic concerts, this does not prove (nor do telephonic concerts given through Reis’s instrument prove) that speech could not be transmitted also. The name “Fernsprecher,” now used in Germany for the Telephone, was only suggested in 1877 by Dr. Stephan, Postmaster of the German Empire, in obedience to the absurd fashion which has raged since 1871 in Germany of rejecting words of classic derivation.
[7] See proceedings in U. S. Court (Dowd suit), Edison’s second answer, and Prescott’s ‘The Speaking Telephone,’ p. 218.
[8] Published volume of Proceedings in the United States Patent Office, before the Commissioner of Patents. Evidence for A. G. Bell, p. 6.
[9] Proc. Soc. Telegr. Engin. and Electr. vol. xi. p. 134, 1882.