alized that his machine could never be used for the
transmission of conversation; and in a letter to a friend he tells of a
code of signals that he has invented.

Bell had once, during his three years of experimenting, made a Reis
machine, although at that time he had not seen one. But he soon threw
it aside, as of no practical value. As a teacher of acoustics, Bell knew
that the one indispensable requirement of a telephone is that it shall
transmit the WHOLE of a sound, and not merely the pitch of it. Such
scientists as Lord Kelvin, Joseph Henry, and Edison had seen the little
Reis instrument years before Bell invented the telephone; but they
regarded it as a mere musical toy. It was "not in any sense a speaking
telephone," said Lord Kelvin. And Edison, when trying to put the Reis
machine in the most favorable light, admitted humorously that when he
used a Reis transmitter he generally "knew what was coming; and knowing
what was coming, even a Reis transmitter, pure and simple, reproduces
sounds which seem almost like that which was being transmitted; but
when the man at the other end did not know what was coming, it was very
seldom that any word was recognized."

In the course of the Dolbear lawsuit, a Reis machine was brought into
court, and created much amusement. It was able to squeak, but not to
speak. Experts and professors wrestled with it in vain. It refused
to transmit one intelligible sentence. "It CAN speak, but it WON'T,"
explained one of Dolbear's lawyers. It is now generally known that while
a Reis machine, when clogged and out of order, would transmit a word or
two in an imperfect way, it was built on wrong lines. It was no more a
telephone than a wagon is a sleigh, even though it is possible to chain
the wheels and make them slide for a foot or two. Said Judge Lowell, in
rendering his famous decision:

"A century of Reis would never have produced a speaking telephone by
mere improvement of construction. 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 had to be done. ... Bell discovered a new
art--that of transmitting speech by electricity, and his claim is not as
broad as his invention.... To follow Reis is to fail; but to follow Bell
is to succeed."

After the victory over Dolbear, the Bell stock went soaring skywards;
and the higher it went, the greater were the number of infringers and
blowers of stock bu