The Telephone Cases The Telephone Cases The Telephone Cases, 126 U.S. 1 (1888), were a series of U.S. court cases in the 1870s and 1880s related to the invention of the telephone, which culminated in the 1888 decision of the United States Supreme Court upholding the priority of the patents belonging to Alexander Graham Bell. Those telephone patents were relied on by the American Bell Telephone Company and the Bell System—although they had also acquired critical microphone patents from Emile Berliner. The objector (or plaintiff) in the notable Supreme Court case was initially the Western Union telegraph company, which was at the time
Reis telephone Reis telephone The Reis telephone was an invention named after Philipp Reis of a telephonelike device he constructed. Reis's first successful work is dated to October 1861. In 1861, Philipp Reis succeeded in creating a device that captured sound, converted it to electrical impulses which were transmitted via electrical wires to another device that transformed these pulses into recognizable sounds similar to the original acoustical source. Reis coined the term "telephon" to describe his device. In 1862, Reis demonstrated his telephone to Wilhelm von Legat, Inspector of the Royal Prussian Telegraph Corps who produced an account of it (Legat, 1862),