The author’s acknowledgments are due in an especial manner to Mr. Albert Stetson, A.M., of Cohasset, Massachusetts, who has given him much valuable assistance in the collection of information both in Germany and in this country, and who has also assisted in the translation of some of the contemporary documents to be found in the work. To the friends, acquaintances, and pupils of Philipp Reis, and especially to the surviving members of the family at Friedrichsdorf, who have most kindly furnished many details of information, the author would express his most cordial thanks. The testimony now adduced as to the aim of Philipp Reis’s invention, and the measure of success which he himself attained, is such, in the author’s opinion, and in the opinion, he trusts, of all right-thinking persons, to place beyond cavil the rightfulness of the claim which Reis himself put forward of being the inventor of the Telephone. Full and sufficient as that testimony is, much more remains as yet unpublished. The author has, for example, been permitted to examine a mass of evidence collected by the Dolbear Telephone Company, which entirely corroborates that which is here presented. It is, however, for certain reasons beyond the author’s control, deemed well at the present moment to withhold this testimony for a little while from publication. The appearance of this volume at the present time needs no apology from the author. He is conscious that all he can do will add little or nothing to the lustre with which the name of Philipp Reis will be handed down to posterity. When the Jubilee of Philipp Reis comes to be celebrated in 1884 (January 7th), the world will find out its indebtedness to the great man whose thoughts survive him. PHILIPP REIS. CHAPTER I. BIOGRAPHY OF THE INVENTOR. [Compiled chiefly from papers left by the deceased, and from the biographical notice of the late Professor Schenk.] Philipp Reis, or, as his full name appears from his autobiographical sketch to have been, Johann Philipp Reis, was born on the 7th of January, 1834, at Gelnhausen, in the principality of Cassel. His father, who belonged to the Evangelical Church, was a master baker, but also pursued farming to some extent, as the circumstances of small provincial towns generally require. As his mother had died young, his paternal grandmother undertook the bringing up of the boy. “While my father,” writes Herr Reis, “strove constantly to cultivate my mental powers by instruction concerning the things which surrounded me (by discussing that which was actually observed), my grandmother turned her activity to training my disposition and to the development of the religious sentiments to which she was eminently fitted by the experiences of a long life, by being well-read, and especially by her gift of narration.”