Invention of the telephone hardly a commercially practical telephone in the modern sense. Thomas Edison tested the Reis equipment and found that "single words, uttered as in reading, speaking and the like, were perceptible indistinctly, notwithstanding here also the inflections of the voice, the modulations of interrogation, wonder, command, etc., attained distinct expression." In 1947, the Reis device was tested by the British company Standard Telephones and Cables (STC). The results also confirmed it could transmit and receive speech with good quality (fidelity), but relatively low intensity. At the time STC was bidding for a contract with Alexander Graham Bell's American Telephone and Telegraph
Invention of the telephone be or not to be...""). The young inventor, positioned at the A. Wallis Ellis store in the neighboring community of Mount Pleasant, received and may possibly have transferred his uncle's voice onto a phonautogram, a drawing made on a pen-like recording device that could produce the shapes of sound waves as waveforms onto smoked glass or other media by tracing their vibrations. The next day on August 4 another call was made between Brantford's telegraph office and Melville House, where a large dinner party exchanged "...speech, recitations, songs and instrumental music". To bring telephone signals to Melville House, Alexander Graham