Note 55 — APPENDIX IV. On the Doctrine of Undulatory Currents.

The following very remarkable passage occurs in the evidence given by Professor Graham Bell concerning Reis’s Telephones. (See published volume of ‘Proceedings in the United States Patent Office before the Commissioner of Patents.’ Evidence for A. G. Bell, p. 14.)

Question 37. “If a Reis Telephone, made in accordance with the descriptions published before the earliest dates of your invention, would in use transmit and receive articulate speech as perfectly as the instruments did which were used by you on June 25, 1876, at the Centennial, would it be proof to you that such Reis’s Telephones operated by the use of undulatory movements of electricity in substantially the same way as your instruments did upon the occasion referred to?”

Answer by Bell. “The supposition contained in the question cannot be supposed. Were the question put that if I were to hear an instrument give forth articulate speech transmitted electrically as perfectly as my instruments did on the occasion referred to in the question, I would hold this as proof that the instrument had been operated by undulatory movements of electricity, I would unhesitatingly answer, Yes.”

Surely no better authority is needed to support the proposition that if Reis made his Telephone speak, as he said he did, he employed undulatory currents.