The Telephone Gambit: Chasing Alexander Graham Bell's Secret (v5) (11 page)

I gingerly held the strange contraption to inspect it. Liffen was, of course, right. It was the item in the collection I had wanted most to see.

PHILIPP REIS’S STORY
is intriguing. Other inventors may well have built early telephones that predated Bell’s work, but none had a case as clear and well documented as Reis’s. He taught physics at the Garnier Institute in the town of Friedrichsdorf, Germany, until his death at the age of forty, and during his lifetime, he remained largely outside the German scientific and technical elite. According to several accounts, Reis was most likely inspired to begin his research on a speaking telegraph device after reading Bourseul’s article, either in its original 1854 version (Reis was fluent in French) or in a popular German translation published later that same year. Regardless of his inspiration, Reis also drew heavily, especially in his receiver design, upon the work of Charles Grafton Page. Reis had some rudimentary success sending sounds over telegraph wires as early as 1858, and dubbed his machine
das Telephon
from the Greek for “distance” (
tele
) and “sound” (
phon
), coining the term for the newfangled telecommunications device.

Over the next few years, Reis made a number of improvements to his device; by 1861, he had a telephone prototype that could reliably transmit music and at least some speech. He demonstrated it widely but never sought a patent on his invention.

Today, we know a good deal about Reis’s story mostly because Silvanus Thompson, a respected English physics professor at the University of Bristol, wrote a detailed, book-length monograph celebrating Reis’s work in 1883, some nine years after his death. It is unambiguously titled
Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone.
Thompson examined Reis’s telephone devices and writings with the analytical eye of a scientist and concluded that they were produced by the true inventor of the telephone. Notably, Thompson even tracked down witnesses who had seen and heard Reis’s machine work during his lifetime.

One such witness was Heinrich Friedrich Peter, a music teacher at the Garnier Institute who was particularly interested in Reis’s research. Peter visited Reis regularly in 1861, the year in which Reis first publicly demonstrated his telephone. Peter recounts that on October 26, 1861, he played the English horn while another colleague sang in a demonstration before a number of academics. He recalls that Reis’s colleagues read sentences from a work by Adolf Spiess entitled the
Book of Gymnastics.
Reis, listening at the receiver, repeated the sentences to the audience as he heard them. When audience members protested that Reis must surely have known the sentences by heart, Herr Peter recalls that he personally

Peter’s recollection is fascinating not only for its detail but also for what it shows of the limitations of Reis’s device. For instance, his receiver, which drew directly from Page’s research, was very weak and required the listener to place his or her ear up against the wooden box that held it. Even then, it was clearly hard to make out all the words. But Reis kept at it. One who witnessed his considerably improved model in action, according to Thompson’s testimonials, was Georg Quincke, a renowned professor of physics at the University of Heidelberg. Quincke writes:

Not surprisingly, the demonstration “astonished and delighted” the association’s members.

The 1863 model that Reis demonstrated to Quincke and others was the same one Liffen had just handed to me. The transmitter was a finely crafted, polished square wooden box. Two such boxes stacked atop one another would be about the size of a half-gallon milk carton. Protruding at an angle off one side of the wooden box was a metal speaking tube. Recessed into the top of the box was a thin, round metal diaphragm that sat just below a V-shaped metal bracket holding an electrical contact point at its vertex.

Liffen and I discussed the design. When the user spoke into the tube, it caused fluctuations in air pressure inside the box that would vibrate the metal diaphragm against the contact point on the bracket above. It was, in other words, a faithful realization of the machine Bourseul had envisioned a few years earlier. The reason it worked, however, was notably distinct from anything Bourseul had envisioned. When the machine was adjusted just right, the diaphragm would not “make and break” contact with the bracket but would, if correctly adjusted, remain in loose contact with it, thereby allowing the sound waves of the speaker’s voice to modulate the electric current from a battery and vary the resistance of the circuit.

“Most people don’t believe that Reis fully understood what was going on in this device,” Liffen said. “And yet, remarkably, it ended up working just about as well as Bell’s model more than a decade later.”

Reis demonstrated the 1863 model of his telephone fairly widely, and he sold at least seven machines to researchers in other countries. One, for instance, made its way to Stephen Yeates, a well-known instrument maker living in Dublin. Interestingly, Yeates not only successfully operated Reis’s machine but significantly improved it, completely redesigning the receiver. In fact, Yeates’s improved model, also part of the Science Museum’s early telephone collection, sat on the shelf right next to the Reis telephone.

PANTALONY WAS RIGHT.
The machines before me offered a refreshingly concrete starting point for any attempt to understand telephone history. I was holding in my hand a prototype reported to have transmitted music and speech while Bell was still a young teenager. Furthermore, it was distributed widely enough that knowledgeable practitioners even improved upon it. If that were the case, then why has Reis’s contribution been virtually forgotten? More to the point: how much did Bell himself know about Reis’s work? After all, Bell had been intensely interested in this rarefied field for years, and had contacted and corresponded with Alexander John Ellis, Sir Charles Wheatstone, and many others in Britain who traveled in scientific circles that would likely have been familiar with Reis’s research.

Sure enough, with a little digging, I established that Bell did know quite a bit about Reis and his telephone. Bell’s first public speech about the telephone at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences cites an article in which Reis discussed his telephonic research. Bell also cited a seminal article by Wilhelm von Legat, a Prussian engineer who described his experiments with Reis’s telephone, explaining its design in detail. According to Silvanus Thompson, these were merely two of no fewer than fifty contemporaneous articles published about Reis’s work. The chances are good that Bell read some of these in addition to the two he explicitly cited. For example, Bell could have learned all about Reis’s device from the 1867 textbook
Electricity
by Robert Ferguson at the Edinburgh Institute in his own hometown. Ferguson doesn’t just mention Reis in passing, he offers a picture of his telephone and a detailed two-page description of how the device operates.

There is also evidence that Bell spoke with others about Reis’s work. In one important example, Charles Cross, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a colleague of Bell’s, recalled under oath that he believed he had spoken to Bell about Reis’s telephone on two occasions, including one as early as the spring of 1874, nearly two years before Bell’s telephone patent.

Even more intriguing is the evidence that Bell not only read or heard about Reis’s machine but that he saw it, perhaps as early as 1862, when he was fifteen years old. An 1886 article carefully tracing Reis’s work notes that one of his early model telephones was purchased and demonstrated that December by a dealer in a well-known Edinburgh shop handling scientific equipment. Although Bell had gone to live for several months with his grandfather in London around that time, Bell’s family was still based in Edinburgh. No concrete evidence survives about the matter in the voluminous Bell family correspondence, but one would imagine that Bell and his acoustically minded family would have been keenly interested in a well-publicized demonstration and sale of Reis’s dramatic, novel machine in their own city.

Meanwhile, no imagining is needed to appreciate the fact that Bell received a firsthand demonstration of a Reis telephone in March 1875, almost a full year before filing his telephone patent. The incident occurred when Bell visited the laboratory of Joseph Henry at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. According to the standard Bell biographies, Henry, then one of the world’s eminent electrical researchers and a person who had played a major role in the invention of the telegraph, offered encouraging words when Bell paid him a call to demonstrate his early research on the multiple telegraph. In court, Bell admitted to having seen the device while visiting Henry’s office at the Smithsonian Institution, although he tried to downplay its significance. As he noted,

All these connections, substantial and tenuous, leave little doubt that Bell was fully aware of Reis’s device, an invention that was famously finicky, but was widely known for years to have successfully transmitted music and speech. As Reis himself wrote in 1863 to William Ladd, a well-known instrument maker in London, in a set of instructions accompanying his
Telephon
:

The extent to which knowledge of Reis’s work guided Bell’s thinking is unclear. There is no hard evidence, for instance, that Bell experimented directly with Reis’s telephone, as he did with many of the devices, such as the tuning fork sounder designed by Helmholtz. Still, at the very least, Bell’s knowledge of Reis’s work ought to have tempered his claims to being the first with a working telephone. But it did not. As Bell declared in one of the many court proceedings:

Amazingly, Bell seems to have prevailed with this self-serving view. On a key occasion in an early legal case when the issue of Reis’s priority came up and a demonstration in a U.S. courtroom was actually staged, no one present managed to get Reis’s instrument to successfully transmit speech.

I wondered what to make of that failed courtroom demonstration, whether it lent credence to the possibility that Thompson and the many testimonials he collected overstated the case for Reis. How well
did
Reis’s machine work? There is no doubt that his device was finicky. But if the prevailing assessment of several experts is correct, Reis made a telephone in the 1860s that worked in spite of its incorrect conceptual reliance on the “make or break” conception spelled out by Bourseul. In communication via the telegraph, after all, the electrical circuit between the two ends of the communication is turned on and off and on in a pattern to spell out a message; hence, it is often called a “make or break” circuit. But such a connection cannot effectively transmit the sound of a voice. Rather, a working telephone (at least in Bell’s day, a century before digitization) required a constant connection in which sound waves from a human voice would, via some kind of transmitter, vary the resistance in a continuous electrical circuit.

In his book, Silvanus Thompson argues that Reis must surely have possessed a working understanding of the principle we now call “variable resistance” in order to have built his machine. Thompson contends that Reis’s telephone itself displays such an understanding, even if Reis’s writings lack the vocabulary to effectively describe it.

I wasn’t sure about Thompson’s assessment. Perhaps Bell, with his patent’s elaborate descriptions of “undulating current,” rightly deserved credit as the first to comprehend this principle. But I knew that Dave Pantalony would probably argue that all the theorizing in the world would be of little use compared with the obvious option of testing Reis’s device itself to determine how well it worked. After all, how much would Reis’s accomplishment be diminished if he had made a working telephone without a full command of the underlying principle on which it operated? It is commonplace for pathbreaking inventions—especially, say, in the pharmaceutical field—to precede a thorough scientific understanding of what makes them work.