This is not the place to discuss a doctrinaire objection sometimes raised, that it is theoretically impossible for Reis’s instruments to work. For the moment we are concerned with the practical question: Do they work? No one practically experienced in telephones, even if he should deny that Reis had any such intention, will dispute that they can now be made to transmit speech. Professor Dolbear, himself no mean authority on telephones, testifies, as quoted above (p. 41), “that _the instruments would talk, and would talk well_.” He would, indeed, be a bold man who would come forward to deny what can be shown any day as an experimental fact: that _Reis’s Telephone will transmit speech_. We have now shown that Philipp Reis was the undisputed inventor of an instrument which he called the Telephone, which instrument can now be used to transmit speech; which was then used to transmit speech; and which was invented on purpose to transmit speech. So far the result of the examination into the facts of the case is conclusive enough. A more complete case could hardly be desired. No honest person could hesitate for want of proof, either greater in amount or more direct to the point. Nevertheless, I propose in another section to go a little further and to prove a technical point of highest interest; namely, that there is not in the Telephone Exchanges of England to-day, any single telephone to be found in which the fundamental principles of Reis’s Telephone are not the essential and indispensable features. These considerations being, however, of a strictly technical nature, will be best considered in an Appendix. As, however, we are able to show that those instruments which are now in daily use for transmitting speech, embody the two fundamental principles upon which Reis based the instrument which he called “_Das Telephon_,” it would be dishonest to the memory of the deceased inventor to claim anything less than that he was the “first and true inventor” of the Telephone. FOOTNOTES: [6] The name “Telephone” had already been applied by Sir C. Wheatstone (1831) to an acoustic arrangement for transmitting sounds through wooden rods to a distant place in a purely mechanical manner. It is needless to observe that speech as well as music can be thus transmitted; and though Wheatstone gave telephonic concerts, this does not prove (nor do telephonic concerts given through Reis’s instrument prove) that speech could not be transmitted also. The name “Fernsprecher,” _now_ used in Germany for the Telephone, was only suggested in 1877 by Dr. Stephan, Postmaster of the German Empire, in obedience to the absurd fashion which has raged since 1871 in Germany of rejecting words of classic derivation. [7] See proceedings in U. S. Court (Dowd suit), Edison’s second answer, and Prescott’s ‘The Speaking Telephone,’ p. 218. [8] Published volume of Proceedings in the United States Patent Office, before the Commissioner of Patents. Evidence for A. G. Bell, p. 6.