Johann Philipp Reis
His grandmother and guardians placed him at Garnier's Institute, in Friedrichsdorf, where he showed a taste for languages, and acquired both French and English, as well as a stock of miscellaneous information from the library.
[7] At the end of his fourteenth year, Reis was accepted to a Hassel Institute, at Frankfurt am Main, where he learned Latin and Italian.
[7] By diligent service he won the esteem of Beyerbach, and devoted his leisure to self-improvement, taking private lessons in mathematics and physics and attending the lectures of Professor R. Bottger on mechanics at the Trade School.
[7] In 1855, he completed his year of military service at Kassel, then returned to Frankfurt to qualify as a teacher of mathematics and science by means of private study and public lectures.
Reis imagined electricity could be propagated through space, as light can, without the aid of a material conductor, and he performed some experiments on the subject.
The results were described in a paper, "On the Radiation of Electricity", which, in 1859, he mailed to Professor Poggendorff for insertion in the then well-known periodical, Annalen der Physik.
[7] Reis, as Bell would later do, had studied the organs of the ear and the idea of an apparatus for transmitting sound by means of electricity had floated on his mind for years.
The learned professor, it seems, regarded the transmission of speech by electricity as a chimera; Reis bitterly attributed the failure to his being "only a poor schoolmaster.
"[7] Reis had difficulty interesting people in Germany in his invention despite demonstrating it to (among others) Wilhelm von Legat, Inspector of the Royal Prussian Telegraph Corps in 1862.
During 1837-38 Professor Page of Massachusetts had discovered that a needle or thin bar of iron, placed in the hollow of a coil or bobbin of insulated wire, would emit an audible 'tick' at each interruption of a current, flowing in the coil, and if these separate ticks followed each other fast enough, by a rapid interruption of the current, they would run together into a continuous hum, to which he gave the name galvanic music.
Reis' transmitter was based on interrupting the current, and the spring was intended to close the contact after it had been opened by the shock of a vibration.
It appears from the report of Herr von Legat, an inspector with the Royal Prussian Telegraphs, which was published in 1862, that Reis was quite aware of this principle, but his instrument was not well adapted to apply it.
No doubt the platinum contacts he employed in the transmitter behaved to some extent as a crude metal microphone, and hence a few words, especially familiar or expected ones, could be transmitted and distinguished at the other end of the line.
Said Judge Lowell, in rendering his famous decision: A century of Reis would never have produced a speaking telephone by mere improvement of construction.
Another line was erected between the physical cabinet at Garnier's Institute across the playground to one of the classrooms, and there was a tradition in the school that the boys were afraid of creating an uproar in the room for fear that Philipp Reis would hear them with his "telephon".
Reis resigned in 1867, but the Free German Institute of Frankfurt, which elected him as an honorary member, also slighted the instrument as a mere "philosophical toy".
After Reis gave a lecture on the telephone at Gießen in 1854, Poggendorff, who was present, invited him to send a description of his instrument to the Annalen.
Reis, it is said, replied: "Ich danke Ihnen sehr, Herr Professor, aber es ist zu spät.
It was announced that he would show his new gravity-machine at a meeting of the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte (Society of German Scientists and Physicians) of Wiesbaden in September, but he was too ill to appear.
Professor Bell was generally accepted as having invented the telephone and Gill thought that evidence to the contrary might disrupt the ongoing negotiations.
The VDE (the German electrical engineering association), Deutsche Telekom and the cities of Friedrichsdorf and Gelnhausen biannually present the Johann-Philipp-Reis Preis (prize) to scientists for "....distinguished scientific achievements in the area of communication technology".
The result was the Gray-Bell telephone controversy, one of the United States' longest-running patent interference cases, involving Bell, Thomas Alva Edison, Elisha Gray, Emil Berliner, Amos Dolbear, J. W. McDonagh, G. B. Richmond, W. L. Voeker, J. H. Irwin, and Francis Blake Jr.
Canada's Parliament quickly followed with a tit-for-tat declaration, which clarified: "....that Alexander Graham Bell of Brantford, Ont., and Baddeck, N.S., [was] the inventor of the telephone.
