From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Philipp Reis (1834-1874) is one of the inventors of electric voice transmission. He constructed a forerunner of the telephone. He was born in Gelnhausen, Germany, and worked as a science teacher.
Documents in the London Science Museum show that, in 1947, engineers from the British firm Standard Telephones and Cables (STC) found that Reis's device dating from 1863 could transmit and "reproduce speech of good quality but of low efficiency".
Sir Frank Gill, then chairman of STC, ordered that the tests be kept secret, as STC was negotiating with the AT&T, which had evolved from the Bell Company of Alexander Graham Bell. Bell was generally accepted to have invented the telephone, and Gill thought that evidence to the contrary might disrupt the negotiations.
