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
Necessity is the mother of invention our invention." Jowett's translation is noted for injecting flowery, if not florid, language familiar to his Victorian era audience. Jowett himself, in "Plato's Republic: The Greek Text", Vol. III "Notes", 1894, p. 82, gives a literal translation of Plato as "our need will be the real creator," without the proverbial flourish. In an address to the Mathematical Association of England on the importance of education in 1917, Alfred North Whitehead argued that ""the basis of invention is science, and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasurable intellectual curiosity."" and in contrast to the old proverb ""Necessity is the mother