82 PROFESSOR BARRETT, On the Telephone. 
Reis’s latest form of telephone there is no comparison between the 
feeble attempts at articulation and the almost perfect articulation 
that is obtainable in Professor Graham Bell’s simple and beauti- 
ful instrument: almost perfect, but not quite, for there is a peculi- 
arity in the sibilants which render them extremely difficult of 
transmission, the letter S sounds as F to the listener at the receiv- 
ing instrument and M sounds as P; so that whim becomes 
whip or even hip: strength turns into something like creap or 
creace, &c. 
In Professor Bell’s telephone the voice itself generates magneto- 
electric currents and hence the reproduced sounds are very faint 
and slight electric disturbances are frequently fatal to the effective 
working of this instrument. The telephone of the future will 
doubtless employ the voice of the speaker to modulate the strength 
of an electric current generated by independent means. Hence 
the discovery of a more perfect and pliable means of varying the 
resistance in a circuit by the act of speaking is one of the chief 
objects to be attained at present in the new art of electric- 
telephony. 
