Reis Telephone
1861 · Telephone · Work 139 of 1,871
The Reis telephone in a Friedrichsdorf schoolroom, a hollow box carved like an ear with a membrane and platinum contact, the receiver a knitting needle in a coil resting on a resonating wooden box.
- What it was used for
- A teaching and demonstration instrument, not a communication service. Philipp Reis taught at the Garnier Institute in Friedrichsdorf and showed the apparatus to the Physikalischer Verein in Frankfurt am Main on 26 October 1861; according to Silvanus P. Thompson's 1883 life of Reis, melodies were transmitted about 300 feet with doors and windows shut. In 1863 J. W. Albert of Frankfurt built examples; the town of Friedrichsdorf states that Reis made them in small numbers and sold them with instructions to interested buyers around the world. No source checked gives a total number built.
- What was new
- Pitch came through the wire reliably, speech only in fragments. The Science Museum writes in its own object record that the apparatus transmitted fragments of speech and musical tones, but that the contacts were of the "make and break" type and could not transmit true "undulatory" current except when out of adjustment, and that the device was too inefficient for practical use without further development. Whether it could carry articulate speech has been disputed since the American telephone litigation and is not settled. The barb sits with the audience of that evening: the Physikalischer Verein, to whom Reis showed it first, could not be persuaded to take the telephone to market, and by its own account grasped its importance only after Reis's death in 1874 - two years before Bell's patent.