Heroes of the Telegraph

Reis had studied the organs of hearing, and the idea of an apparatus for transmitting sound by means of electricity had been floating in his mind for years. Incited by his lessons on physics, in the year 1860 he attacked the problem, and was rewarded with success. In 1862 he again tried Poggendorff, with an account of his 'Telephon,' as he called it;[The word 'telephone' occurs in Timbs' REPOSITORY OF SCIENCE AND ART for 1845, in connection With a signal trumpet operated by compressed air.] but his second offering was rejected like the first. The learned professor, it seems, regarded the transmission of speech by electricity as a chimera; but Reis, in the bitterness of wounded feeling, attributed the failure to his being 'only a poor schoolmaster.' Since the invention of the telephone, attention has been called to the fact that, in 1854, M. Charles Bourseul, a French telegraphist, [Happily still alive (1891).] had conceived a plan for conveying sounds and even speech by electricity. 'Suppose,' he explained, 'that a man speaks near a movable disc sufficiently flexible to lose none of the vibrations of the voice; that this disc alternately makes and breaks the currents from a battery: you may have at a distance another disc which will simultaneously execute the same vibrations.... It is certain that, in a more or less distant future, speech will be transmitted by electricity. I have made experiments in this direction; they are delicate and demand time and patience, but the approximations obtained promise a favourable result.'[See Du Moncel's EXPOSE DES APPLICATIONS, etc.]