The title of this little work sufficiently indicates its nature and scope. The labour of preparing it has not been slight, and has involved the expenditure of much time in prosecuting inquiries both in this country and in Germany amongst the surviving contemporaries of Philipp Reis. To set forth the history of this long-neglected inventor and of his instrument, and to establish upon its own merits, without special pleading, and without partiality, the nature of that much-misunderstood and much-abused invention, has been the aim of the writer. The thought that he might thus be of service in rendering justice to the memory of the departed worthy has inspired him to his task. He has nothing to gain by making Reis’s invention appear either better or worse than it really was. He has therefore preferred to let the contemporary documents and the testimony of eye-witnesses speak for themselves, and has added that which seemed to him desirable in the way of argument in the form of four appendices.
The author’s acknowledgments are due in an especial manner to Mr. Albert Stetson, A.M., of Cohasset, Massachusetts, who has given him much valuable assistance in the collection of information both in Germany and in this country, and who has also assisted in the translation of some of the contemporary documents to be found in the work. To the friends, acquaintances, and pupils of Philipp Reis, and especially to the surviving members of the family at Friedrichsdorf, who have most kindly furnished many details of information, the author would express his most cordial thanks. The testimony now adduced as to the aim of Philipp Reis’s invention, and the measure of success which he himself attained, is such, in the author’s opinion, and in the opinion, he trusts, of all right-thinking persons, to place beyond cavil the rightfulness of the claim which Reis himself put forward of being the inventor of the Telephone. Full and sufficient as that testimony is, much more remains as yet unpublished. The author has, for example, been permitted to examine a mass of evidence collected by the Dolbear Telephone Company, which entirely corroborates that which is here presented. It is, however, for certain reasons beyond the author’s control, deemed well at the present moment to withhold this testimony for a little while from publication. The appearance of this volume at the present time needs no apology from the author. He is conscious that all he can do will add little or nothing to the lustre with which the name of Philipp Reis will be handed down to posterity. When the Jubilee of Philipp Reis comes to be celebrated in 1884 (January 7th), the world will find out its indebtedness to the great man whose thoughts survive him.
[Compiled chiefly from papers left by the deceased, and from the biographical notice of the late Professor Schenk.]
Philipp Reis, or, as his full name appears from his autobiographical sketch to have been, Johann Philipp Reis, was born on the 7th of January, 1834, at Gelnhausen, in the principality of Cassel. His father, who belonged to the Evangelical Church, was a master baker, but also pursued farming to some extent, as the circumstances of small provincial towns generally require. As his mother had died young, his paternal grandmother undertook the bringing up of the boy. “While my father,” writes Herr Reis, “strove constantly to cultivate my mental powers by instruction concerning the things which surrounded me (by discussing that which was actually observed), my grandmother turned her activity to training my disposition and to the development of the religious sentiments to which she was eminently fitted by the experiences of a long life, by being well-read, and especially by her gift of narration.”
On attaining his sixth year the boy was sent to the common school of his native town. His teachers soon recognised that he possessed no ordinary endowments, and sought to induce his father to entrust him later to a higher institution of learning. His father agreed to this; and the plan was to have been carried out after the boy had passed the middle-class of the common school. How the father contemplated the carrying out of the plan is not known; he died ere the son had yet completed his tenth year.
As a considerable number of children from Frankfort-on-the-Main and its neighbourhood, attended that time Garnier’s Institute at Friedrichsdorf, near Homburg, the idea occurred to his guardian and his grandmother to entrust the boy to this school. He entered there when in his eleventh year. “The foreign languages, English and French, taught in the Institute, attracted me specially. The library of the Institute, rich and well chosen for its size, gave my mind excellent nourishment.” At the end of his fourteenth year he had passed through the school, organised as it then was, and he now went to Hassel’s Institute at Frankfort-on-the-Main. His delight in the study of language induced him to learn Latin and Italian. And here, also, the taste for the study of natural sciences and mathematics appears to have been awakened in him. The lively zeal with which he applied himself to both these disciplines induced his teachers to advise his guardian that he should allow the boy to attend the Polytechnic School at Carlsruhe, on finishing his course at the Institute. “All the endeavours of my well-wishing teachers shattered themselves, however, against the will of one of my guardians, who was also my uncle. He wished that I should follow mercantile pursuits.... I wrote him at that time that I should, indeed, be obedient and learn the pursuit prescribed for me, but that I should in any case continue my studies later.”
On the 1st of March, 1850, Philipp Reis entered the colour establishment of Mr. J. F. Beyerbach, of Frankfort, as an apprentice. By diligence and punctuality he soon won the esteem of his principal. All his leisure time he bestowed upon his further education. He took private lessons in mathematics and physics, and attended the lectures of Professor R. Böttger, on Mechanics, at the Trade School. And so the end of his apprenticeship arrived. At the conclusion of it he entered the Institute of Dr. Poppe, in Frankfort. “Several of my comrades in this establishment, young people of sixteen to twenty years old, found it, as I did, a defect that no natural history, history, or geography, was taught. We determined, therefore, to instruct one another in these subjects. I undertook geography, and formed from this first occasion of acting as teacher the conviction that this was my vocation. Dr. Poppe confirmed me in this view and aided me by word and deed.”
In the year 1851, whilst resident in Frankfort, Reis had become a member of the Physical Society of that city. This Society, which still flourishes, then held, and still continues to hold, its meetings in the Senckenburg Museum. Lectures in Chemistry and Physics are delivered by resident professors in regular courses every week throughout the winter, under the auspices of this Society; and every Saturday evening is devoted to the exposition of recent discoveries or inventions in the world of physical science, astronomy, etc. The most active members of this Society during the time of Reis’s connection with it were the late Professor Böttger, Professor Abbe (now of Jena), and Dr. Oppel, all of whom contributed many valuable original memoirs to the Jahresberichte, or Annual Reports, published by the Society. Amongst its corresponding and honorary members it counted the names of all the best scientific men of Germany, and also the names of Professor Faraday, Professor Sturgeon, and Sir Charles Wheatstone. Doubtless the discussion of scientific questions at this Society greatly influenced young Reis. He remained for three years a member, but dropped his connexion for a time on leaving Frankfort. He subsequently rejoined the Society in the session of 1860-61, remaining a member until 1867, when he finally resigned.
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.”
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:—
Principal Dates in Reis’s Life.
| 1834 | January 7 | Philipp Reis born. |
| 1850 | March 1 | Apprenticed to Beyerbach. Year of Military Service at Cassel. Settled in Friedrichsdorf. |
| 1859 | September14 | Married. Invented the Telephone. |
| 1861 | October 26 | Read Paper “On Telephony by the Galvanic Current” before the Physical Society of Frankfort-on-the-Main. |
| " | November16 | Read Paper to the Physical Society of Frankfort-on-the-Main, entitled “Explanation of a new Theory concerning the Perception of Chords and of Timbre as a Continuation and Supplement of the Report on the Telephone.” |
| 1861 | December | Wrote out his Paper “On Telephony,” as printed in the ‘Jahresbericht.’ |
| 1862 | May 8 | Notice in ‘Didaskalia’ of Reis’s invention. |
| " | May 11 | Lectured and showed the Telephone to the Free German Institute (Freies Deutsches Hochstift) in Frankfort-on-the-Main. Article on the Telephone, communicated by Inspector Von Legat to the Austro-German Telegraph Society, and subsequently printed in its ‘Zeitschrift’ (Journal). |
| 1863 | July 4 | Showed his improved Telephone to the Physical Society of Frankfort-on-the-Main. |
| " | September 6 | Reis’s Telephone shown to the Emperor of Austria and the King of Bavaria, then visiting Frankfort. |
| " | Sept. 17-24 | Meeting of the “Deutscher Naturforscher” at Stettin; Reis’s Telephone shown there by Professor Böttger. |
| 1864 | February 13 | Meeting of the “Oberhessische Gesellschaft für Natur- und Heilkunde” at Giessen; Lecture by Professor Buff, and exhibition by Reis of his Telephone. |
| " | September21 | Meeting of the “Deutscher Naturforscher” at Giessen. Reis gave an explanation of the Telephone and the history of its invention, and exhibited it in action before the most distinguished scientific men of Germany. |
| 1872 | September | Meeting of the “Deutscher Naturforscher” at Wiesbaden; Reis announced to show his “Fallmaschine,” but prevented by ill-health. |
| 1874 | January 14 | Philipp Reis died. |
In describing the various forms successively given by the inventor to his apparatus, as he progressed, from the earliest to the latest, it will be convenient to divide them into two groups, viz. the Transmitters and the Receivers.
So far as can be learned, Reis constructed transmitters in some ten or twelve different forms. The complete series in this course of evolution does not now exist, but the principal forms still remain and will be described in their historical order. Theoretically, the last was no more perfect than the first, and they all embody the same fundamental idea: they only differ in the mechanical means of carrying out to a greater or less degree of perfection the one common principle of imitating the mechanism of the human ear, and applying that mechanism to affect or control a current of electricity by varying the degree of contact at a loose joint in the circuit.
Naturally enough the inventor of the Telephone began with crude and primitive[3] apparatus. The earliest form of telephone-transmitter now extant, was a rough model of the human ear carved in oak wood, and of the natural size, as shown in Figs. 2, 3, 4, & 5.
The end of the aperture a was closed by a thin membrane b, in imitation of the human tympanum. Against the centre of the tympanum rested the lower end of a little curved lever c d, of platinum wire, which represented the “hammer” bone of the human ear. This curved lever was attached to the membrane by a minute drop of sealing-wax, so that it followed every motion of the same. It was pivoted near its centre by being soldered to a short cross-wire which served as an axis; this axis passing on either side through a hole in a bent strip of tin-plate screwed to the back of the wooden ear. The upper end of the curved lever rested in loose contact against the upper end g of a vertical spring, about one inch long, also of tin-plate, bearing at its summit a slender and resilient strip of platinum foil. An adjusting-screw, h, served to regulate the degree of contact between the vertical spring and the curved lever. The conducting-wires by which the current of electricity entered and left the apparatus were connected to the screws by which the two strips of tin-plate were fixed to the ear. In order to make sure that the current from the upper support of tin should reach the curved lever, another strip of platinum foil was soldered on the side of the former, and rested lightly against the end of the wire-axis, as shown in magnified detail in Fig. 6. If now any words or sounds of any kind were uttered in front of the ear the membrane was thereby set into vibrations, as in the human ear. The little curved lever took up these motions precisely as the “hammer”-bone of the human ear does; and, like the “hammer”-bone, transferred them to that with which it was in contact. The result was that the contact of the upper end of the lever was caused to vary. With every rarefaction of the air the membrane moved forward and the upper end of the little lever moved backward and pressed more firmly than before against the spring, making better contact and allowing a stronger current to flow. At every condensation of the air the membrane moved backwards and the upper end of the lever moved forward so as to press less strongly than before against the spring, thereby making a less complete contact than before, and by thus partially interrupting the passage of the current, caused the current to flow less freely. The sound waves which entered the ear would in this fashion throw the electric current, which flowed through the point of variable contact, into undulations in strength. It will be seen that this principle of causing the voice to control the strength of the electric current by causing it to operate upon a loose or imperfect contact, runs throughout the whole of Reis’s telephonic transmitters. In later times such pieces of mechanism for varying the strength of an electric current have been termed current-regulators.[4] It would not be inappropriate to describe the mechanism which Reis thus invented as a combination of a tympanum with an electric current-regulator, the essential principle of the electric current-regulator being the employment of a loose or imperfect contact between two parts of the conducting system, so arranged that the vibrations of the tympanum would alter the degree of contact and thereby interrupt in a corresponding degree the passage of the current.
Mr. Horkheimer, a former pupil of Reis, informs me that a much larger model of the ear was also constructed by Reis. No trace of this is, however, known.
The second form, a tube constructed by Reis himself, of tin, is still to be seen in the Physical cabinet of Garnier’s Institute, at Friedrichsdorf, and is shown in Fig. 7. It consists of an auditory tube a, with an embouchure representing the pinna or flap of the ear. This second apparatus shows also a great similarity with the arrangement of the ear, having the pinna or ear-flap, the auditory passage, and the drum-skin (a, b, c). Upon the bladder c there still remains some sealing-wax, by means of which a little strip of platinum, for the all-essential loose-contact that controlled the current, had formerly been cemented to the apparatus.
The third form, also preserved in the collection in Garnier’s Institute, is given in Fig. 8, which, with the preceding, is taken by permission from the pamphlet of the late Professor Schenk, consists of a round tin box, the upper part of which fits upon the lower precisely like the lid of a collar-box. Over this lid b, which is 15 centimetres in diameter, was formerly stretched the vibrating membrane, there being also an inner flange of metal. Into a circular aperture below opened an auditory tube a, with an embouchure representing the pinna. The precise arrangements of the contact-parts of this apparatus are not known. Mr. Horkheimer, who aided Reis in his earlier experiments, has no knowledge of this form, which he thinks was made later than June 1862. This is not improbable, as the design with horizontal membrane more nearly approaches that of the tenth form, the “Square-box” pattern.
The instrument described by Reis in his paper “On Telephony,” in the Annual Report of the Physical Society of Frankfort-on-the-Main, for 1860-61 (see p. 50), comes next in order. The inventor’s own description of this telephone (Fig. 9) is as follows:—
“In a cube of wood, r s t u v w x, there is a conical hole abpnphFig. 10