Читать книгу Philipp Reis: Inventor of the Telephone - Silvanus P. Thompson - Страница 9

The instrument described by Reis in his paper “On Telephony,” in the Annual Report of the Physical Society of Frankfort-on-the-Main, for 1860–61 (see p. 50), comes next in order. The inventor’s own description of this telephone (Fig. 9) is as follows:—

Fig. 9.

“In a cube of wood, r s t u v w x, there is a conical hole a, closed at one side by the membrane b (made of the lesser intestine of the pig), upon the middle of which a little strip of platinum is cemented as a conductor [or electrode]. This is united with the binding screw p. From the binding screw n there passes likewise a thin strip of metal over the middle of the membrane, and terminates here in a little platinum wire, which stands at right-angles to the length and breadth of the strip. From the binding-screw p a conducting wire leads through the battery to a distant station.” The identical apparatus used by Reis was afterwards given by him to Professor Böttger, who later gave it to Hofrath Dr. Th. Stein, of Frankfort, from whose hands it has recently passed into the possession of the author of this work. It possesses one feature not shown in the original cut, viz. an adjusting screw, h, which, so far as the writer can learn, was put there by Reis himself. There appears no reason to doubt this, since there was an adjusting screw in Reis’s very earliest form of transmitter, the wooden ear. A section of the actual instrument is given in Fig. 10.

Fig. 10.