Today, an old question: who invented the telephone?
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created
them.
Ask who really invented the
telephone, and you may get the name of a German, Philipp
Reis, not Alexander Graham Bell. The common wisdom is
that Reis's telephone was only marginal, while Bell's
phone really worked. Now Lewis Coe rethinks the priority
question in his book, The Telephone and its Several
Inventors.
Reis was a 26-year-old science teacher when he began
work on the telephone in 1860. His essential idea came
from a paper by a French investigator named Bourseul. In
1854 Bourseul had explained how to transmit speech
electrically. He wrote:
Speak against one diaphragm and let each
vibration "make or break" the electric contact. The
electric pulsations thereby produced will set the
other diaphragm working, and [it then
reproduces] the transmitted sound.
Only one part of Bourseul's idea was shaky. To send
sound, the first diaphragm shouldn't make or break
contact. It should vary the flow of electricity to the
second diaphragm continuously. Reis used Bourseul's term,
"make or break," but his diaphragm actually drove a thin
rod to varying depths in an electric coil. He didn't make
and or break the current. He varied it continuously.
Bell faced the same problem when he began work on his
telephone a decade later. First, he used a
diaphragm-driven needle, entering a water/acid solution,
to create a continuously variable resistance and a
smoothly varying electrical current. Bell got that idea
from another American inventor, Elisha Gray.
Of course evaporation and immobility both make a
liquid pool impractical. Bell soon gave it up in favor of
a system closer to Reis's electromagnet. Still, it's
clear that Gray's variable resistance pool had pointed
the way for Bell. And so we wonder, was Bell also
influenced by Reis's invention? Reis died two years
before Bell received his patent. He was only 40, and he
never did get around to seeking a patent for his
device.
Reis's phones were tricky. The diaphragm was too
delicate. A German company produced them with
inconsistent results. Some worked well. Some transmitted
only static. Reis's phones were demonstrated all over
Europe. One was demonstrated in Scotland while Bell was
back there visiting his father. We don't know if Bell saw
it. However, he could hardly have been unaware of Reis's
work.
Still, we don't want to deny Bell's brilliance. He
produced a robust and viable telephone, and he had the
force of personality to sell it to a skeptical public.
But to do that, he did what all inventors do. He built on
the combined wisdom of others -- just as Reis had built
on the work of Bourseul before him.
The very word priority cheats all but one
person of credit. In fact, we must thank Bourseul, Reis,
Gray, Bell -- all of them. For great inventions are
always the gift of many people, not just one.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where
we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
(Theme Music)
Coe, L., The Telephone and Its Several
Inventors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company,
Inc., Publishers, 1995.
I am grateful to Judy Myers, UH Library, for
suggesting the Coe book and providing me with a copy of
it.
For more on the invention of the telephone, see
Episode 748.
from the 1897 Encyclopaedia Britannica
from the 1897 Encyclopaedia Britannica
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
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