Morning journal and courier., 1883-07-17
[Ho INVENTED THE TELMPHONE ,

WHO INVENTED THE TELEPHONE .
 An interesting summary of the history of
 the telephone of Johann Philip Refs is given
 in the Popular Science Monthly for August
 It is claimed that Refs was the first inventor
 of the telephone and that it became common property before Bells time. Evidence is given to show that Refs discovered the cleo l tric transmission of speech in 1S6o-'61; that
 he elaborately described and exhibited his
 telephone in 1861; that he invented trans- hitting and receiving instruments, which not
 only talked then and talk now, but which in
 clude the essential principles of the receivers
 and transmitters now in use; and that he
 manufactured, placed on the market and sold
 his instruments in 1863, for the purpose of illustrating the electric transmission of speech l and song.
 Refs first memoir on the telephone, deliv-
 cred before the Physical society of Frank fort-on-the-Main, in 1861. and printed in
 their ''AnnuaP' for the same year, begins
 thus: 'FThe surprising results in the domain of telegraphy have often already suggested
 the question whether it may not be possible
 to communicate the very tones of speech di-
 rect to distance" He says that "the cardinal
 question" always was Chow could a single in-
 strument reproduce at once the total action
 of all the organs operated by human speech"
 'Until now C1861) it has not been possible to
 reproduce the 'tones' of human speech with
 distinctness to satisfy everybody.
 The consonants are for the most part tolerably distinctly reproduced, but the vowels not yet in an elegant degree" The memoir concludes thus:
 ''There may probably remain much to be done toward making the telephone of prac- tical commercial value. For physics, how ever, it has already sufficient interest in that it has opened out new field of labor" It is pointed out that granting that the articu.. lation at this time and even in 1864, was poor-poorer even than Gray's in 1875 and Bells in the spring of 1876-it was still ar- ticulation, understood where the words were not foreknown by the listener.
 Between 1861 and 1864 Refs gave public | exhibitions of his telephone before various scientific bodies and it became, we are told, "Wldely" known. In addition to his own lectures and papers on the telephone it was the subject of lectures and reports by promi- | nent men in various parts of Germany, and I in 1863 it was exhibited to the Emperor of | Austria and King Max of Bavaria, then on l 8 visit to Frankfort. Telephones, also, were ! sent to various parts of the world and were manufactured for Refs in Frankfort and sold | for scientific illustrative use in 1863. It is related that in September, 1864, after sue. cessful exhibition before the Association of 1 German Naturalists at Gressen he received | at last an invitation from Poggendorf to pre- pare an account of the telephone for the "Aunalen.'' Refs replied, thanking was too late, that he should | not send it, and that his apparatus would be- come known without description in the ''Annslen." But Refs telephone did not at. tract the attention he thought it would, and Refs himself died of consumption January 14, 1874.
 What we have given above indicates the foundation for the claim that Refs was the first inventor of the telephone. Professor Sylvanus Thompson, from whose forthcom- ing book the writer in-the Popular Science Monthly takes his facts, says: s'There is not, in the telephone exchanges of England 5o-day, any single telephone to be found in which the fundamental principles of Reis' telephone are not the essential and indispen- table features" If this is true the decision of the United States courts that Professor Bell is the discoverer of new and useful 'rt (the electric transmission of speech, to which he has exclusive title, is not sound. But holders of telephone property need not ear reversal of the decision for long ime yet, and if it should come it would not :uin the existing telephone companies which ,ould continue to do business with whatever telephone they could get the cheapest. And 70 extensive and complete are the lines of telephone wires in many parts of the coun- ry Connecticut for instance) that compet- ng companies would have 'ta poor show ven with 8 free telephone.