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.
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