alt Hacker News"It was able to squeak, but not to speak. Experts and professors wrestled with it in vain. It refused to transmit one intelligible sentence." [0]
"A translation of Legat's article on Reis' invention was obtained by Thomas Edison prior to his filing his patent application on a telephone in 1877. In correspondence of 1885, Edison credits Reis as having invented "the first telephone", with the limitation that it was "only musical not articulating"." [1]
Fascinating stuff nonetheless, these inventors and their ideas... See also previous experimenters [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reis_telephone
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Philipp_Reis#Previous_e...
Yeah - though Bell's first apparatus wasn't much better - the invention of the carbon microphone is what really what set the telephone on to being a practical device. The rest of it was trying to build a network to connect people - and that was really hard (and capital intensive).