Specialty coffee in Friedrichsdorf: 1 checked café

The first sentence sent down a wire was not a lofty one: 'The horse does not eat cucumber salad'. It was thought up by Philipp Reis, a teacher at the local boarding school, who in 1861 put together a telephone in a shed behind the house - the transmitter was an ear carved from wood with a membrane of pig's gut, the receiver a knitting needle in a coil, and the resonating box a violin. The nonsense was deliberate: had the sentence made sense, the listener in the next room could simply have guessed it. Frankfurt's physicists waved it off anyway, an offended Reis resigned from their society, and the patent on the telephone was carried off a dozen or so years later by Bell.