Johann Philipp Reis, born on 7 January 1834, was a self-taught German scientist and inventor. In 1861, he constructed the first make-and-break telephone, today called the Reis telephone.
In 1878, four years after his death and two
years after Bell received his first telephone patent, European scientists
dedicated a monument to Philip Reis as the inventor of the telephone.
Documents of 1947 in London's Science Museum
later showed that after their technical adjustments, engineers from the British
firm Standard Telephones and Cables (STC) found Reis' telephone dating from
1863 could transmit and "reproduce speech of good quality, but of low
efficiency".
Sir Frank Gill, then chairman of STC, ordered
the tests to be kept secret, as STC was then negotiating with AT&T, which
had evolved from the Bell Telephone Company, created by Alexander Graham Bell.
Professor Bell was generally accepted as having invented the telephone and Gill
thought that evidence to the contrary might disrupt the ongoing negotiations.
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