The precise circumstances that led to Klein’s intervention have never been described before, but they can be easily reconstructed from letters Klein exchanged with Max Noether. This correspondence took place just as Noether and Alexander Brill were putting the last touches on their massive report on the history of algebraic functions [@B-N].[^3]

This episode, as it emerges from the Klein–Noether correspondence, sheds new light on Noether’s deep concerns about his report and the reception it might receive. Quite clearly, he saw parts of it as substantiating his own priority rights and larger intellectual legacy. Furthermore, the story told here testifies to the importance of oral communication not only for disseminating mathematical knowledge but also as a factor in contemporary discussions of priority claims. It can thus be seen as a case study supporting my longstanding interest in the oral dimensions of modern mathematical cultures (see [@Rowe2003], [@Rowe2004], [@Rowe2018]).

![Julian Lowell Coolidge, 1873–1954 (Pach Bros., Cambridge, MA, photographer, ca. 1890)](jlc){width="8cm" height="12cm"}

The result that Coolidge called “Clebsch’s Transformation Theorem” states that any arbitrary plane algebraic curve can be birationally transformed into another having only double points as singularities. Jean Dieudonné, quite possibly on Coolidge’s authority, also attributed this theorem to Clebsch 