The Horse Does Not Eat Cucumber Salad: How Philipp Reis Invented the Telephone

The American Alexander Graham Bell is commonly regarded as the inventor of the telephone. But as many as 16 years earlier, on October 26, 1861, the 27-year-old physicist Philipp Reis unveiled his “telephone” to members of the Physikalischer Verein in Frankfurt am Main.

“I managed to invent an apparatus (…)” that made it possible to “reproduce all kinds of sounds using galvanic current and at any distance – I called this instrument the 'telephone’.”
Philipp Reis, June 1868

Between 1861 and 1863, Philipp Reis experimented with various materials and designs as he worked on his transmitter. He was gradually getting closer to the final design for his telephone.

In order to convert acoustic oscillations into electrical impulses, Reis placed a membrane made from a pig’s intestines inside his transmitter, and this was mechanically stimulated by the sound waves associated with speech.

The membrane was coupled with an electrical contact, which was closed by the vibrations. The electrical current varied with the pressure exerted on the contact.

Reis made his receiver from a knitting needle, a wire coil, and a wooden box. It used the principle of magnetostriction to reproduce the sounds and words transmitted.

When the electrical impulses from the transmitter flowed through the coil, this created a magnetic field and the needles inside the coil started to oscillate. The wooden box used as the resonance body amplified these and rendered them audible.

From 1863, Philipp Reis asked the mechanic Johann Wilhelm Albert, based in Frankfurt am Main, to manufacture a small production run of his telephones. These handmade individual pieces of apparatus featured slight deviations and so each one was, effectively, unique.

In order to prove his telephone could actually transmit speech, Philipp Reis arranged a demonstration using nonsensical sentences such as "The horse does not eat cucumber salad" or “The sun is made of copper.”

However, the apparatus created by Philipp Reis was not yet suitable for phone calls in the sense of a 2-way conversation.

The verdict of his contemporaries was rather mixed, with people failing to see the potential of the invention.
 
Philipp Reis was discouraged by a lack of recognition in professional circles. Only in 1872–73 did he return to work on the telephone, when he built a new type of receiver.
 
This development went largely unnoticed too and the physicist died in 1874, never knowing the eventual emergence of the telephone in Germany.
 

This seemingly truly inconspicuous collection of items—a rolled-up, evidently aged piece of wire, a business card, and a handwritten note—is nothing less than a relic of the history of technology: Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson used this wire for their first telephone speech tests in 1875.

"This piece of wire is part of the test line used by Prof. A. G. Bell and T. A. Watson in the first tests and all subsequent tests up to the final development of the Bell telephone. The test line in question was set up from room 13 to room 15 at No. 5 Exeter Place Boston in August 1875 and remained there until Mr. Watson removed it himself on July 8, 1877. Mr. Watson gave me 6 feet of wire, and I cut off a piece measuring around a yard.
E. Berliner, Hanover, June 10, 1881."
 

The first tests in Berlin were conducted as early as October 25, 1877. Then, on October 26, the very first telephone conversation in Germany took place between Stephan’s office at Leipziger Straße 15 and the main telegraph office in Französische Straße.

 
 
On November 12, 1877, the first telegraph office with telephone technology was opened in Germany and featured Bell telephones manufactured in Germany.

Initially, the new medium of telephony was only used within the postal service for the transmission of telegrams. There were no public telephone networks in Germany until 1881.