David E. Hughes and Carbon Microphone

Inventor of Carbon Microphone

English-born American David Edward Hughes is widely agreed as the inventor of the carbon microphone, a device important in the development of telephony. He also invented the induction balance for metal detectors and the printing telegraph system.

David Hughes was born in London, England on May 16, 1831. At the age of seven, he moved to the United States with his Welsh parents. In 1850, he became a music professor in Kentucky at the college of Bardstown. He later became a natural philosophy professor in the same school. Hughes only spent four years in the academic field, from where he began working on various devices, such as the type-printing telegraph and carbon microphone.


He was an experimental physicist, mostly in the areas of electricity and signals. Hughes greatly improved Thomas A. Edison's 1877 carbon-button transmitter that led to Alexander Graham Bell's telephone audible enough for use at that point in time. To describe the transmitter's ability to transmit weak sounds to a Bell telephone receiver, Hughes revived the term "microphone."

David Hughes also invented the induction balance used in metal detectors. In 1879, he transmitted and received radio waves using a detector made of carbon. Despite his skills as an experimenter, he had little mathematical training.

Hughes was already transmitting and receiving electromagnetic waves over several hundred metres in 1879,  years before Heinrich Hertz and 16 years before Guglielmo Marconi demonstrated the workings of radio waves.

He didn't mention his work until a magazine article was published in 1889. James Clerk Maxwell's theories were not well received yet and Hughes' transmissions were also wrongly assumed to be electromagnetic induction. For this, his achievements went unrecognized for decades.

Hughes invented a printing telegraph system in the United States in 1855. In less than two years, a number of small telegraph companies united to form one large corporation — Western Union Telegraph Co. to carry on the business of telegraphy on the Hughes system. Hughes’ Telegraph System became an international standard in Europe.

The first book-length biography of David Hughes, by Ivor Hughes and David Ellis Evans, was published in 2011 by Images From The Past.

David E Hughes died on January 22, 1900. The inventor was equally successful in all of his endeavours, but the carbon microphone remains his greatest invention.

Patents:

David E Hughes, U.S. Patent 14,917 Telegraph (with alphabetic keyboard and printer) issued May 20, 1856

David E Hughes, U.S. Patent 22,531 Duplex Telegraph issued January 4, 1859

David E Hughes, U.S. Patent 22,770 Printing Telegraph (with type-wheel) issued January 25, 1859

 

Resources:

Britannica.com - Excerpts of facts about carbon microphone

Inventor of Microphone - David Edward Hughes

Inventor of the Week Feature, Lemelson MIT Program - David Hughes

Spark Museum: Early Radio and Scientific Apparatus



Image Credit:

en.wikipedia.org / Public Domain


(c) May 2016. Tel. Inspired Pen Web. All rights reserved.