Frey's family provided refuge for Friedrich Hecker when he fled the repression following the revolution in Germany in 1848.

After attending gymnasium in Basel, Frey went to study in an agronomical institute in Jena.

[1] In 1860 he emigrated to the United States, arriving in Belleville, Illinois, an area with many Forty-Eighters, veterans of the 1848 revolutions in Europe.

[4] He didn't count with the mandatory military service in Switzerland, but on his return from the United States, in view of his experience from the American civil war, he was made a major of the Swiss Army from the beginning.

He held the post for almost a quarter of a century and took part in the International Telegraph Conferences of 1903 in London and 1908 Lisbon.

[5][6] After leaving ITU in August 1921, Frey died, two months after his eighty-fifth birthday, on Christmas Eve 1922.

In 1870, he married Emma Kloss (born 1848) from Liestal, with whom he had five children: Hans (1871–1913), Emil (1872–1913), Carl (1873–1934), Anna (1874–1893) and Helene (1876–1944).