Johann Philipp Reis

Johann Philipp Reis was a self-taught German scientist and teacher of mathematics and science who built the first make-and-break telephone in 1861, a device he called the Reis telephone, and who coined the word telephone itself. His apparatus could carry sound about one hundred meters and demonstrated that speech could be converted into an electrical signal, though it could not reproduce articulated speech clearly. Reis died in 1874, and European scientists erected a monument to him in 1878 recognizing his role as a telephone pioneer. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/