Note 3 — Chapter II · THE INVENTOR’S APPARATUS.

Dr. Messel, F.C.S., a former pupil of Reis, and an eye-witness of his early experiments, makes, in a letter to Professor W. F. Barrett, the following very interesting statement: “The original telephone was of a most primitive nature. The transmitting instrument was a bung of a beer-barrel hollowed out, and a cone formed in this way was closed with the skin of a German sausage, which did service as a membrane. To this was fixed with a drop of sealing-wax a little strip of platinum corresponding to the hammer of the ear, and which closed or opened the electric circuit, precisely as in the instruments of a later date. The receiving instrument was a knitting needle surrounded with a coil of wire and placed on a violin to serve as a sounding board. It astonished every one quite as much as the more perfect instruments of Bell now do. The instrument I have described has now passed into the hands of the Telegraph Department of the German Government.” [The instrument now in the museum of the Reichs Post-Amt in Berlin is not this, but is the first of the “Improved” Telephones described later by Reis in his “Prospectus” (see p. 85), and is stamped “Philipp Reis,” “1863,” “No. 1.”] S.P.T.