[49] See Prescott’s ‘Speaking Telephone,’ p. 158.
[50] ‘British Patent,’ No. 1874, of the year 1876 (dated 4th May).
[51] Prescott, ‘Speaking Telephone,’ p. 203.
[52] Yet Bell’s claim (British Patent Specification) runs: “I claim the production of any given sound or sounds from the armature of the receiving instrument.”
[53] In making these comparisons in parallel columns, I wish to repudiate in the most emphatic way any sinister inference that might be drawn as to Graham Bell’s use of descriptions and curves identical in so many points with those of Reis. For, in the first place, I believe Professor Bell to be incapable of such contemptible appropriations, and the candour with which he has himself invited comparison by giving various references to Reis’s papers, itself precludes such inference. In the second place, I do not think that at the date of these quotations Bell understood German sufficiently well to comprehend Reis’s very precise statement of the problem of the Telephone. I simply exhibit these parallel extracts to show the thoroughness with which Reis had grappled with the problem with which, fourteen years later, Bell also grappled; and to prove in the most irrefragable manner, from the necessary identity in the terms selected for expressing the facts of the solution of the problem, that the problem to which each found a solution was identical. The circumstance that does, however, puzzle me, and which does not appear in these parallel extracts, is that, whilst in his original memoir, Reis speaks in detail of the auditory ossicles and their movements as having suggested his transmitter, and casually mentions the phonautograph of Scott in support of his views, Bell, in his original lecture before the American Academy, speaks in detail of Scott’s phonautograph as having suggested his transmitter, and casually refers to the auditory ossicles and their movements.
[54] Reis’s failures were chiefly with the vowels, Bell’s more particularly with the consonants. Reis’s contacts were liable to break, and the following-springs of his contact-regulators too little pliable. Bell’s transmitter could not open and close the circuit proportionally with the motions of the tympanum, and owing to the sluggishness due to self-induction in the coils of his telephone, the induced undulations of the current failed to come up in suddenness to those of the tympanum. In consequence whip sounded like whim, and kiss like kith, even in the perfected Bell Telephones made two years after Bell’s first “improvements” in telephony were patented.
[55] The following very remarkable passage occurs in the evidence given by Professor Graham Bell concerning Reis’s Telephones. (See published volume of ‘Proceedings in the United States Patent Office before the Commissioner of Patents.’ Evidence for A. G. Bell, p. 14.)
Question 37. “If a Reis Telephone, made in accordance with the descriptions published before the earliest dates of your invention, would in use transmit and receive articulate speech as perfectly as the instruments did which were used by you on June 25, 1876, at the Centennial, would it be proof to you that such Reis’s Telephones operated by the use of undulatory movements of electricity in substantially the same way as your instruments did upon the occasion referred to?”
Answer by Bell. “The supposition contained in the question cannot be supposed. Were the question put that if I were to hear an instrument give forth articulate speech transmitted electrically as perfectly as my instruments did on the occasion referred to in the question, I would hold this as proof that the instrument had been operated by undulatory movements of electricity, I would unhesitatingly answer, Yes.”
Surely no better authority is needed to support the proposition that if Reis made his Telephone speak, as he said he did, he employed undulatory currents.