Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone. Silvanus P. Thompson
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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.
|