Note 54 — APPENDIX IV. On the Doctrine of Undulatory Currents.

Reis’s failures were chiefly with the vowels, Bell’s more particularly with the consonants. Reis’s contacts were liable to break, and the following-springs of his contact-regulators too little pliable. Bell’s transmitter could not open and close the circuit proportionally with the motions of the tympanum, and owing to the sluggishness due to self-induction in the coils of his telephone, the induced undulations of the current failed to come up in suddenness to those of the tympanum. In consequence whip sounded like whim, and kiss like kith, even in the perfected Bell Telephones made two years after Bell’s first “improvements” in telephony were patented.