THE FIRST TELEPHONE. 
53 
telephonic transmitters in use to-day, such as Blake’s, Berliner’s, 
and Crossley’s. The receivers devised by Reis, more particularly 
the second form, anticipate every principle essential in the more 
modern and convenient receiver of Graham Bell, having an 
electromagnet combined with an armature capable of inductive 
action, i. e., made of iron, elastically mounted, and having an 
extended surface. Bell made the very great improvement of 
uniting these three qualities, essential to the armature, in one, 
by employing as armature a thin flexible iron plate. It is but just 
to the later inventors to add that both Bell and Edison have 
explicitly referred to Reis’s prior work. Bell even going so far as 
to name the pages of Kuhn’s Handbook from which the prece- 
ding reference is taken. 
