2024-01-12 08:25:15
“The horse doesn’t eat cucumber salad.” – This first sentence transmitted by wire now belongs in the pantheon of immortal bon mots. The meaningless twist was devised so that the receiver at the premiere in 1860 would not be suspected of having colluded with the man at the transmitter. And there sat the inventor of that miraculous device, the Friedrichsdorf teacher Philipp Reis. On the 150th anniversary of his death on January 14th, the newly designed city museum named after him in the Hochtaunus district in Hesse has opened and is offering a special tour.
In the department for the development of the “telephone” – this made-up word (“distant tones”) also comes from Reis – explanations make it easier to understand how the rather collage-like arrangement of a wooden ear, knitting needle, copper wire, a violin and two “batteries” It was possible to use “galvanic current to reproduce sounds of all kinds at any distance”. Even the honorable gentlemen of the Physical Association in Frankfurt frowned and judged after the successful demonstration in October 1861 that the device could “never, ever be used as a practical means of transport”.
The “tinkerer and boss,” as Reis modestly saw it, was not discouraged by this. However, his early death prevented the technology from being ready for commercial use in series production, and he would probably have been forgotten if the Reichspost had not claimed him as the actual inventor of the “telephone” in order to avoid patent fees, based on the successful Graham Bell.
It was the Federal Post Office that set up a small memorial for the first time in 1952 in the house that Reis had bought in 1858. The transfer to the municipality in 1979 changed little, until the move out of the temporarily stored city archives in 2003 was seen as an opportunity to give the building its original purpose – including the original furniture acquired from private ownership.
Further departments were added to support the rise of the community, founded by Huguenots in 1687, from a cloth-making village to a prosperous commercial location. But it was only after clearing out an apartment that it became possible to expand the entire house right down to the exposed roof structure in order to do justice to all facets of the city and its most famous people, including Marie Blanc and Édouard Desor.
Both lives look like a modern version of a fairy tale. The cobbler’s daughter Marie Hensel, born in 1833, became one of the richest women in Europe thanks to her marriage to the casino founder of (Bad) Homburg and Monte Carlo, François Blanc, while Desor, born in 1811, like Reis, was an orphan at an early age and persecuted as a participant in the Hambach Festival in 1832. became an important scientist and politician in Switzerland.
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