Reis telephone

On October 26, 1861, fifteen years before Alexander Graham Bell's famous patent, a German physics teacher named Philipp Reis demonstrated an instrument he called the 'Telephon' to the Physical Society of Frankfurt. He transmitted musical tones through an electrical wire, and—more controversially—he may have transmitted intelligible speech. The device worked on a principle that would later prove inadequate for practical telephony, but it demonstrated that voice could travel through wires, and it inspired the inventors who followed.

Reis was a self-taught scientist, teaching physics at the Garnier Institute in Friedrichsdorf near Frankfurt while pursuing his own experiments. His transmitter was ingeniously simple: a carved wooden ear, covered with a membrane like an eardrum, with a platinum strip resting lightly against a platinum contact. Sound waves vibrated the membrane, causing the strip to make and break contact with the platinum point. Each vibration created an electrical pulse. At the receiving end, a similar mechanism converted the pulses back into sound.

The make-and-break principle had a fatal limitation. The contact was either closed or open—the signal was digital in modern terms, not analog. Musical tones, which are relatively simple waveforms, transmitted tolerably well. Complex sounds like speech, with their subtle variations in amplitude, transmitted poorly or not at all. The device could carry the pitch of a voice but not its texture. Whether Reis ever achieved intelligible speech transmission remains disputed, with witnesses offering contradictory testimony.

Reis built perhaps fifty instruments over the next decade, demonstrating them to scientific societies across Europe. Scientists in Britain, America, and Germany experimented with his devices. The term 'telephone' itself comes from Reis—he coined it from Greek roots meaning 'far sound.' But he never commercialized his invention, and he died of tuberculosis in 1874, two years before Bell's patent would launch the telephone industry.

The Reis telephone became central to the great telephone patent wars of the 1870s and 1880s. Bell's rivals argued that his patent was invalid because Reis had invented the telephone first. The legal and technical arguments turned on whether Reis's make-and-break mechanism could transmit speech. Bell's defenders insisted that only continuous variable resistance—Bell's principle—could reproduce the human voice. In one famous courtroom demonstration, a Reis telephone failed to transmit clearly, seeming to vindicate Bell's claims. Later researchers suggested the device might have been deliberately adjusted to fail.

Thomas Edison, whose carbon microphone would make Bell's telephone practical for long-distance use, explicitly studied Reis devices before developing his own transmitter. Edison understood that the make-and-break principle was insufficient but that it pointed toward something valuable. His carbon button microphone used variable resistance continuously, not interrupted contact, but the basic insight—that sound waves could modulate an electrical signal—came partly from Reis's demonstration that such modulation was possible.

The Reis telephone illustrates both the continuity and the discontinuity of invention. Reis proved the concept; Bell made it work; Edison made it work well. Each built on predecessors while solving problems the predecessors had not solved. The question of who 'really' invented the telephone has no clean answer—the technology emerged from a community of experimenters, each contributing pieces that only made sense combined with others. Reis's make-and-break transmitter was a dead end technically, but it was a proof of concept that showed the path to others.