Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone. Silvanus P. Thompson
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associated with his name: justice to the struggling family whom, instead of enriching, it impoverished; and, not least, the justice of patience, whilst the story of his life and work, and the words he himself has written thereupon, are unfolded.
The point at issue, and for which justice has been invoked, and of which ample proof is given in these pages, is not whether Philipp Reis invented a telephone—that is not denied—but whether Philipp Reis invented the Telephone. The irony of fate, not to say the curious ignorance which is often called by a less polite name, has decreed by the mouth of popular scientific writers, of eminent engineers, and of accomplished barristers, that Reis’s invention was not an instrument for transmitting human speech at all—was not intended even for this—that it was a purely musical instrument in its inception, and that it has always so remained. These clever persons begin to persuade themselves of this view, and forthwith invent a question-begging epithet, and dub the instrument as a mere “tone-telephone”! If some unprejudiced person ventures to speak of Reis’s instrument as having, as a matter of history, transmitted speech, all the contemptuous reply that he gets from the eminent somebody, who poses as an authority for the moment, is: Oh, but, you know, it was only a tone-telephone, a musical toy, and when some one was singing to it you fancied you caught the words of the song which, during singing, were occasionally projected along with the music. I’ve always regarded the accounts of its transmission of speech as a good joke; all it could possibly do was occasionally to utter an articulate noise in combination with a musical tone. Besides, you know, Mr. Reis was a musical man, who only intended it to sing, and if it spoke it only spoke by accident; but such an accident never did or could occur, because the construction of it shows that it not only did not but could not transmit speech. If Mr. Reis had really penetrated the fundamental principle of the articulating telephone, he would have arranged his instruments very differently; and then, you know, if he really had transmitted speech the discovery would have attracted so much attention at the time. Moreover, if he had meant it to talk, he would have called it the articulating telephone, and not a telephone for transmitting tones, you know; no one before Graham Bell ever dreamed of using a tympanum to catch articulate sounds, or had he done so he would have been laughed at.
To all such clap-trap as this—and there has been enough ad nauseam of such—the one reply is silence, and a mute appeal to the original writings of Reis and his contemporaries, and to the tangible witness of inexorable scientific facts. All the most important of these will be found in their appropriate places. They amply establish the following points:—
I.—Reis’s Telephone was expressly intended to transmit speech.
II.—Reis’s Telephone, in the hands of Reis and his contemporaries, did transmit speech.
III.—Reis’s Telephone will transmit speech.
Before proceeding to discuss these three points we will pause for a moment, first to clear away a lurking verbal fallacy, then to point out the partial historic acknowledgment already conceded to Reis’s claims.
Reis did not call his instrument an “articulating telephone.” Neither did he call it a “tone telephone.” He called it simply “The Telephone” (Das Telephon),[6] as will be seen in his own first memoir (p. 57). He did speak of his instrument again and again as an instrument “for reproducing tones.” But it must be remembered that the German word Ton (plural Töne) used by Reis is more nearly equivalent to our English word “sound,” and includes articulate as well as musical tones, unless the context expressly indicates otherwise. So that when Reis talked of the Reproduction of Tones he was using words which did not limit his meaning to musical tones, as indeed his memoirs show in other ways. He started from a consideration of the mechanical structure of the human ear, and endeavoured to construct an instrument on those lines because the ear can take up all kinds of tones. Reis was not so foolish as to imagine that the construction of the human ear was solely designed for musical, to the exclusion of articulate tones. We are not aware that the epithet, Tone-Telephone, was ever applied to Reis’s instruments until it became advisable(!) to seek a means of disparaging an old invention in order to exalt a new one. And it is a curious point that the true musical “tone-telephones,” i.e. instruments designed expressly to transmit specific musical tones for the purpose of multiple telegraphy, were invented (by Varley, Gray, La Cour, Graham Bell, and Edison) long after Reis’s Telephone, between the years 1870 and 1876. All these were dependent practically upon the tuning-fork system of vibration, whereas Reis’s system was based on the tympanum of the ear. To classify Reis’s invention with these would be absurd.
Having shown the fallacy bound up in the term “tone-telephone,” we will dismiss the point with the remark that henceforth it will be a waste of time to argue with any person who applies that question-begging epithet to Reis’s invention.
Partial historic acknowledgments of Reis’s claims as inventor of The Telephone have been made from time to time by those best qualified to speak.
Mr. Edison, the inventor of the famous lamp-black button transmitter, which he christened later as “The Carbon Telephone,” has himself stated in his account of his inventions,[7] that he was started upon this line of investigation by having put into his hand, by the late Hon. Mr. W. Orton, a manuscript translation of Legat’s Report on Reis’s Telephone, given in the Journal of the Austro-German Telegraph Union (see Translation, p. 70). So that he was, therefore, aware at least of this: that in Reis’s instruments “single words uttered, as in reading, speaking, and the like, were perceptible indistinctly, nevertheless, here also the inflexions of the voice, the modulations of interrogation, exclamation, wonder, command, etc., attained distinct expression.” So far as Mr. Edison is concerned, therefore, Reis is his starting-point by his own direct avowal.
Professor Graham Bell has not failed to acknowledge his indebtedness to Reis, whose entry “into the field of telephonic research” he explicitly draws attention to by name, in his “Researches in Electric Telephony,” read before the American Academy of Sciences and Arts, in May 1876, and repeated almost verbatim before the Society of Telegraph Engineers, in November 1877. In the latter, as printed at the time, Professor Bell gave references to the researches of Reis, to the original paper in Dingler’s ‘Polytechnic Journal’ (see Translation, p. 61); to the particular pages of Kuhn’s volume in Karsten’s ‘Encyclopædia’ (see p. 106), in which diagrams and descriptions of two forms of Reis’s Telephone are given; and where mention is also made of the success with which exclamatory and other articulate intonations of the voice were transmitted by one of these instruments; and to Legat’s Report, mentioned above (and given in full on p. 70). Professor Bell has, moreover, in judicial examination before one of the United States Courts expressly and candidly stated,[8] that whilst the receivers of his own early tone-telephones were constructed so as to respond to one musical note only, the receiver of Reis’s instrument, shown in Legat’s Report (as copied in Prescott’s ‘Speaking Telephone,’ p. 10), and given on p. 109 of this work, was adapted to receive tones of any pitch, and not of one tone only. It is further important to note that in Professor Bell’s British Patent he does not lay claim to be the inventor, but only the improver of an invention: the exact title of his patent is, “Improvements in Electric Telephony (Transmitting or causing sounds for Telegraphing Messages) and Telephonic Apparatus.”
So far as Professor Bell is concerned, therefore, he is guiltless of stigmatising the Reis instrument as a mere “tone-telephone.”
Professor Dolbear, the inventor of the “Static Receiver” form of Telephone, is still more explicit in avowing Reis’s claim. In the report of his paper on “the Telephone,” read, March 1882, before the Society of Telegraph Engineers and of Electricians[9] we find: “The speaker could testify that the instrument would talk, and would talk well. The identical instruments employed by Reis would do that, so that Reis’s transmitters would transmit. Secondly, his receiver would receive; and Reis did transmit and receive articulate speech with such instruments.”
As far as Professor Dolbear is concerned, therefore, he admits in unequivocal terms the whole claim of Reis to be the inventor of The Telephone.
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