8vo. 57-64pp. (Whole volume, 80pp.) With six folding tables. As issued, with original publisher's pink paper backstrip. Housed in recent custom morocco-backed buff card cover, within buff card slipcase. Spine sunned, general title a trifle dusty.

The rare first edition of Johann Phillip Reis's (1834-1874) paper on the invention of the telephone as presented in a lecture before the Physical Society of Frankfurt on 26th October 1861. Reis was the first, in 1860, to produce a functioning device that could transmit musical notes, indistinct speech, and occasionally distinct speech by means of electric signals. Practically, Reis's telephones had varying success; some worked well and others produced only static. Nevertheless, they were displayed all over Europe and one was on show in Scotland when Bell was there visiting his father. Although the term 'telephone' had been assigned to earlier communication mechanisms, Reis was the first apply the word to the electronic 'make and brake' device with which we now associate it.

OCLC records copies at only three locations (Harvard, National Diet Library, and, NEBIS).