Poor Philip Reis himself, the son of a baker in Frankfort, Germany, had hoped to make a telephone, but he had failed.

His machine was operated by a "make-and-break" current, and so could not carry the infinitely delicate vibrations made by the human voice.

It could transmit the pitch of a sound, but not the QUALITY.

At its best, it could carry a tune, but never at any time a spoken sentence.

Reis, in his later years, realized that his machine could never be used for the transmission of conversation; and in a letter to a friend he tells of a code of signals that he has invented.
Bell had once, during his three years of experimenting, made a Reis machine, although at that time he had not seen one.