Reis Telephone (1861-63)

Nineteenth-century innovations regularly produced sensory revolutions. With railroads, for example, there was speed. Photographs, perceived as timeless slices of precise visual information, disturbed the once unbroken continuum of visual perception. The arrival of the telephone, for its part, produced a sensory revolution in hearing. The first successful transmission of speech by electricity was accomplished by Johann Philipp Reis (1834-1874), a self-taught scientist and inventor from Friedrichsdorf. Among other subjects, Reis had studied the organs of the ear. His “Telephon,” whose groundbreaking originality was later recognized by Thomas Edison, revolutionized the aural reception of speech, which now could be completely disembodied.