phragm in his transmitter was held close to, but not in con tact with, the electrodes, so that the impulses of the air caused by the human voice, musical tones or any sound, would cause the diaphragm to touch the electrodes, and so, by completing the circuit, cause the current to flow and carry the sound to the receiving instrument. The first telephone and all telephones made since which actually carried the repeated words were constructed upon the principle that the electrical current had to be continuous, and in order to transmit speech by electricity, it was necessary to cause an undulatory, or increasing and diminishing current, to flow in the circuit over which transmission was sought, and that the strength of this current must, at all times, be in exact accordance with the vibratory movements of the air against the diaphragm, which produces the sound at the other end of the line.

The Reis instrument which had been exhibited in court had been carelessly packed so that the terminals of the battery had been pressed against the diaphragm, thus forming the continuous contact which was the only thing which stood between Reis and fame and fortune. This accident was fully and successfully explained to the court. It seems strange that with all his years of work and experiment, this simple solution of his life problem never occurred to Reis and that he had to die and never know how near he was to the accomplishment of the great end to which he devoted so much thought and hard work. And yet he had some reward. His instrument was really the foundation upon which rest the great telephone systems of today.

He sleeps today in the little graveyard of Friedrichsburg, under a monument erected by his loving friends, upon which there are carved the words: "Der Erfinder des Telephons."

An inventor, a teacher and a scientist, he gave his thoughts and his invention to the world, as he himself said, for laboratory purposes, in order to give to others also the facilities for experimenting.

In disposing of the claims made for Reis as having anticipated Bell, the Supreme Court said:

"It is not contended that Reis had ever succeeded in actually transmitting speech, but only that his instrument was capable of it if he had known how. He did not know how; all of his experiments in that direction were failures. With the help of Bell's later discoveries in 1875, we now know why he failed. . . . We have not had our attention called to a single item of evidence which tends in any way to show that Reis, or any one who wrote about him, had it in his mind that anything else than the intermittent current caused by the opening and closing of the circuit could be used to do what was wanted. No one seems to have thought there could be another way. All recognized the fact that the 'minor differences in the original vibrations' had not been satisfactorily reproduced, but they attributed it to the imperfect mechanism of the apparatus used, rather than to any fault in the principle on which the operation was made to depend. It was left for Bell to discover that the failure was due, not to workmanship, but to the principle which was adopted as the basis of what was to be done. He found that what he called the 'intermittent current'-one caused by alternately opening and closing the circuit-could not be made, under any circumstances, to reproduce the delicate forms of the air vibrations caused by the human voice, but that the true way was to operate on an unbroken current, by increasing and diminishing its intensity. This he called a 'vibratory or undulatory current,' not because the current was supposed to actually take that form, but because it expressed with sufficient accuracy his idea of a current which was subjected to gradual changes of intensity, exactly analogous to the changes of density in the air occasioned by its vibrations. Such was his discovery and it was new. Reis never thought of it, and he failed to transmit speech telegraphically; Bell did, and he succeeded. Under such circumstances it is impossible to hold that what Reis did was an anticipation of the discovery of Bell."

And so the claims made under the invention of Reis were disallowed by the Supreme Court. Other claims of minor importance were summarily disposed of by the court.

To the claims of Daniel Drawbaugh the court devoted a large part of the opinion and it was upon his claims that the dissenting opinion of Justices Bradley, Field and Harlan was filed.

At the time of the trial Daniel Drawbaugh was 54 years of age, living at Eberly's Mill, Pa., and was a skillful and ingenious mechanic, without the knack of turning his skill, knowledge and ingenuity to commercial account. He was

miserably poor, in debt, and with a large and helpless family dependent on his daily labor. It was alleged by the Peoples Telephone Company, who had bought up Drawbaugh's claims, that for these reasons he was unable to patent his invention, or caveat it, or manufacture and introduce it on the market.

On the 21st day of July, 1880, he filed an application for a patent, as the first and original inventor of the telephone. On the 6th of May, 1880, Edgar W. Shields, a merchant of Harrisburg, Pa.; M. W. Jacobs, a lawyer of the same place, and Lysander Hill, a lawyer then residing in Washington, D. C., made an arrangement with Daniel Drawbaugh by which they were to become jointly interested with him in his telephone inventions, each to have a quarter interest. Drawbaugh was paid nothing for this contract, but each of the parties was to have a one-quarter interest in anything that should be realized from the enterprise. The opinion goes very fully into the relations of Drawbaugh and his associates, as well as into the events of his life and his other inventions, some of which were patented. He had invented water motors, electric clocks and rotary measuring faucets, in which he had succeeded in interesting capital in a small way. After setting forth at length the claims of Drawbaugh, the court said: "Under these circumstances, it becomes important to consider the conduct of Drawbaugh in reference to his alleged invention during this twenty years of eventful history, as connected with the discovery and use of telephones. If the present claim is true, his experiments began almost as far back as those of Reis, and he had in his shop at Eberly's Mills, within three miles of Harrisburg, telephones that were substantially perfect months before Bell, on the 2nd of June, 1875, got the clue to his subsequentdiscoveries. It is conceded that 'D' and 'E' (exhibits introduced in evidence at the trial), made as is claimed in February, 1875, are substantially as good magneto instruments as any Bell had used before December, 1881; and that 'L,' 'M,' 'G,' 'O' and 'H' (also exhibits), all of which,

it is claimed, were constructed by August, 1876, and some in February, 1875, are as good or nearly as good microphones as those of Blake, which were not invented until 1878." Here follows, in the opinion, a discussion of the publicity given to Bell's inventions and a lengthy quotation from Drawbaugh's testimony showing that he had visited the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia in 1876 and had there seen a telephone. For the next four years Drawbaugh worked on electrical clocks, rotary measuring faucets and water motors, all of which were patented. It was the view of the court that it would have been impossible of belief that if Drawbaugh had perfected the models introduced as exhibited on the trial, when he reached home from the Centennial, that he would have set to work on his clock, faucet and water motor, instead of calling the attention of his friends to his great discovery of the telephone, which he was in danger of losing by the patent which had been issued to another, and which he could not but have known was even then attracting the greatest attention; and that "no man of his intelligence, with or without the enthusiasm he was said to have possessed, could have remained silent under such circumstances." And it was upon this proposition of Drawbaugh's "remaining silent" that the majority opinion decided against Drawbaugh's claim to the invention of the telephone.

One hundred and forty-nine persons testified at the trial that they saw the Drawbaugh telephone before the time that Bell testified that he had his first idea of the transmission of speech by electricity. Two hundred and twenty witnesses swore that they had talked over, or heard over, or seen, the instruments at various times prior to the 2nd of June, 1875, when Bell claimed he first conceived the method by which the human voice might be carried by electricity.

The court did not overlook this testimony. The opinion says it was all studied with care and that if there had been no other testimony in the case, it would have been more difficult to reach the conclusion that Drawbaugh's claim was

not sustained. "But in our opinion their effect has been completely overcome by the conduct of Drawbaugh." The testimony of this perfect cloud of witnesses was swept aside by the majority opinion of the court, and the statement made that "the instruments could not have done what the witnesses supposed they did, and that what they saw and heard was produced by other means than an electric speaking telephone." In closing upon the Drawbaugh branch of the case, the court said: "We do not doubt that Drawbaugh may have conceived the idea that speech could be transmitted to a distance by means of electricity, and that he was experimenting upon that subject; but to hold that he discovered the art of doing it before Bell did would be to construe testimony without regard to 'the ordinary laws that govern human conduct.' Without pursuing the subject further, we decide that the Drawbaugh defense has not been made out."

Before passing to the question of fraud in Bell's application, I wish to take up at this point the dissenting opinion, as it is based solely upon the Drawbaugh claims.

The dissenting opinion, written by Justice Bradley, said:

"Mr. Justice Field, Mr. Justice Harlan and myself are not able to concur with the other members of the court sitting in these cases, in the result which has been reached by them. Without expressing an opinion on other issues, the point upon which we dissent relates to the defense made upon the alleged invention of Daniel Drawbaugh and applies to all cases in which that invention was set up. We think that Drawbaugh anticipated the invention of Mr. Bell, who, at most, is not claimed to have invented the speaking telephone prior to June 10, 1875. We think that the evidence on this point is so overwhelming, with regard to both the number and character of the witnesses, that it cannot be overcome.

"The essence of the inveniton claimed by Mr. Bell is the transmission of articulate speech to a distance by means of an electrical current subjected to undulations produced by the air vibrations of the voice. There are two modes (as yet discovered) by which these undulations may be thus produced. In one they are produced by interposing in the circuit a substance whose electrical conductivity may be varied by the concussions or vibrations of the air produced by the voice. This is called the 'variable resistance process,' because the electrical current is subjected to the variable resistance or conductivity of the substance interposed.