David Edward Hughes (16 May 1831 – 22 January 1900) was coinventor of the microphone, an accomplished Welsh musician and a professor of music, as well as chair of natural philosophy at a seminary for women in Bardstown, Kentucky.
Hughes was born to Welsh parents in London in 1831 and emigrated to the United States as a young man. He was an experimental physicist, mostly in the areas of electricity and signals. He also invented an improved microph...
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David Edward Hughes (16 May 1831 – 22 January 1900) was coinventor of the microphone, an accomplished Welsh musician and a professor of music, as well as chair of natural philosophy at a seminary for women in Bardstown, Kentucky.
Hughes was born to Welsh parents in London in 1831 and emigrated to the United States as a young man. He was an experimental physicist, mostly in the areas of electricity and signals. He also invented an improved microphone, which was a modification of Thomas Edison's carbon telephone transmitter. He revived the term "microphone" to describe the transmitter's ability to transmit extremely weak sounds to a Bell telephone receiver. He invented the induction balance (later used in metal detectors) and in 1879 he transmitted and received radio waves using a Detector made of Carbon. Despite Hughes' facility as an experimenter, he had little mathematical training. He was a friend of William Henry Preece.
In 1879, years before Heinrich Hertz and sixteen years before...
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