In the 1880s, the great French scientist Edmond Becquerel realized that the telephone would be one of the great innovations of the future.

• Manuscript by Edmond Becquerel.
• One sheet, two pages.
• In French.
• 21 cm x 29 cm.
• France, 1880s.
• Excellent condition.
• Unique piece.

In this note, probably addressed to the committee responsible for awarding a prize of around 50,000 francs, Edmond Becquerel evaluates two inventions: he considers Zénobe Gramme's dynamo to be interesting, but derived from previous works (Pacinotti, Romilly, etc.) and therefore unworthy of such a high prize; Alexander Graham Bell's telephone seems to him to be a completely new advance, opening up a new field of applications that has already been acclaimed by industry. He therefore recommends refusing the prize to Gramme and awarding it to Bell.

Some translated excerpts

About Gramme Dynamo

“The Gramme machine does not seem to me to constitute a sufficient discovery to justify such a high reward, close to 50,000 francs.”

“It is an induction machine, as already existed before, but with a circular armature for the currents — Mr. Pacinotti and de Romilly had already built it.”

“Granting a grand prize to Gramme is to recognize the supremacy of this machine, and that, for me, is not justified.”

About Bell's Phone

“The telephone, on the contrary, can today be considered fully justified, useful from a practical point of view.”

“There is a rapid, unrestrained demand for this device.”

“If Mr. Bell hadn’t made his telephone, we wouldn’t have anything accurate.”

“The telephone is something totally new.”

Edmond Becquerel was a 19th-century French physicist best known for discovering the photovoltaic effect in 1839, a phenomenon in which certain materials produce electricity when exposed to light—the basis of modern solar cells. He also excelled in studies of fluorescence, phosphorescence, spectroscopy, and color photography. Without his discovery, advances such as radiotherapy, nuclear energy, or carbon-14 dating would not have been possible. For this reason, Edmond Becquerel is a true pioneer of modern physics, comparable to Röntgen with X-rays or Einstein with the theory of relativity. Although his son Henri received more recognition for discovering natural radioactivity, it was Edmond who paved the way for a new era of science.

The manuscript is fascinating for the history of the telephone because Becquerel argues that Alexander Graham Bell's telephone "opened up a radically new domain" and sparked "a rapid, unrestrained search." In other words, the text documents the enthusiasm of a scientist faced with the novelty of the telephone, at a time when many of his peers were still hesitant about its practical usefulness, a rare snapshot of the scientific and industrial debate that preceded the mass adoption of telecommunications, which occurred 120 years later.