ght there, several of the students agreed to instruct
each other in these subjects. Reis undertook geography, and believed
he had found his true vocation in the art of teaching. He also became a
member of the Physical Society of Frankfort.

In 1855 he completed his year of military service at Cassel, then
returned to Frankfort to qualify himself as a teacher of mathematics and
science in the schools by means of private study and public lectures.
His intention was to finish his training at the University of
Heidelberg, but in the spring of 1858 he visited his old friend and
master, Hofrath Garnier, who offered him a post in Garnier's Institute.
In the autumn of 1855 he removed to Friedrichsdorf, to begin his new
career, and in September following he took a wife and settled down.

Reis imagined that electricity could be propagated through space, as
light can, without the aid of a material conductor, and he made some
experiments on the subject. The results were described in a paper 'On
the Radiation of Electricity,' which, in 1859, he posted to Professor
Poggendorff; for insertion in the well-known periodical, the ANNALEN
DER PHYSIK. The memoir was declined, to the great disappointment of the
sensitive young teacher.

Reis had studied the organs of hearing, and the idea of an apparatus for
transmitting sound by means of electricity had been floating in his
mind for years. Incited by his lessons on physics, in the year 1860 he
attacked the problem, and was rewarded with success. In 1862 he again
tried Poggendorff, with an account of his 'Telephon,' as he called
it;[The word 'telephone' occurs in Timbs' REPOSITORY OF SCIENCE AND ART
for 1845, in connection With a signal trumpet operated by compressed
air.] but his second offering was rejected like the first. The learned
professor, it seems, regarded the transmission of speech by electricity
as a chimera; but Reis, in the bitterness of wounded feeling, attributed
the failure to his being 'only a poor schoolmaster.'

Since the invention of the telephone, attention has been called to the
fact that, in 1854, M. Charles Bourseul, a French telegraphist, [Happily
still alive (1891).] had conceived a plan for conveying sounds and even
speech by electricity. 'Suppose,' he explained, 'that a man speaks near
a movable disc sufficiently flexible to lose none of the vibrations of
the voice; that this disc alternately makes and breaks the currents
from a battery: you may have at a dist