afraid to make a noise in the class-room lest Herr Reis should hear them while among his instruments.
In 1861 Reis exhibited his telephone to the Physical Society of Frankfort, and his elaborate and illustrated memoir on that occasion appears in its "Annual" for 1860-'61.
In 1862 Reis sent a memoir on the telephone to Poggendorf for his "Annalen," which was again declined, despite the advocacy of Professor Bottger and Professor Midler of Freiburg—Poggendorf "treating the transmission of speech by electricity as a myth." Reis felt this rejection very keenly, ascribing it to his inferior position as a poor schoolmaster.
Between 1861 and 1864 Reis gave public exhibitions of his telephone before various scientific bodies, and it became widely known. In addition to his own lectures and papers on the telephone, it was the subject of lectures and reports by prominent men in various parts of Germany, and in 1863 it was exhibited to the Emperor of Austria and King Max of Bavaria, then on a visit to Frankfort. Telephones, also, were sent to various parts of the world, and were manufactured for Reis by Albert, of Frankfort, and sold for scientific illustrative use in 1863. It is related that, in September, 1864, after a successful exhibition before the Association of German Naturalists at Giessen, he received at last an invitation from Poggendorf to prepare an account of the telephone for the "Annalen." Reis replied, thanking him, and telling him that it was too late, that he should not send it, and that his apparatus would become known without description in the "Annalen."
If this offer had not been refused by Reis, the diffusion of the telephone would probably have taken place at a much earlier day. It did not, however, pass out of sight. It was figured and described in encyclopaedias and text-books in different languages. Reis's telephone in England was the subject of experiment and improvement; and it is even rumored with a good deal of probability that his instruments were so far improved in a German neighborhood in Pennsylvania that fluent talking was obtained some years before the revival of the telephone in this country by Gray and Bell.
The year 1864 was probably the culminating point of Reis's career in connection with the telephone, though his labors continued. He proclaimed the invention of the speaking telephone as an accomplished scientific fact, and confidently predicted its practical commercial application. The indifference with which his discovery was often received, and the rebuffs which he encountered, told on a sensitive temperament, and still more on a body struggling with a fatal disease in the early prime of life. For several years he discharged his professional duties only by great effort. We can see the poor schoolmaster of Friedrichsdorf, who had created the telephone, striving at disadvantage to earn the necessaries of life for his wife and children, though we have
