Title: Who really invented the telephone?
Headings: Who Really Invented the Telephone?
Who Really Invented the Telephone?
Content: It was not an imitation of Bell's, he insisted, but an improvement upon an  electrical device made by a German named Philip Reis, in 1861. Thus there appeared upon the scene the  so-called "Reis telephone," which was not a telephone at all, in any practical  sense, but which served well enough for nine years or more as a weapon to use against the  Bell patents. Poor Philip Reis himself, the son of a baker in Frankfort, Germany, had  hoped to make a telephone, but he had failed. His machine was operated by a  "make-and-break" current, and so could not carry the infinitely delicate  vibrations made by the human voice. It could transmit the pitch of a sound, but not the  QUALITY. At its best, it could carry a tune, but never at any time a spoken sentence. Reis, in his later years, realized that his machine could never be used for the  transmission of conversation; and in a letter to a friend he tells of a code of signals  that he has invented. Bell had once, during his three years of  experimenting, made a Reis machine, although at that time he had not seen one. But he soon  threw it aside, as of no practical value.