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David Edward Hughes (16 May 1831 – 22 January 1900) was coinventor of the microphone, an...

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 Guglielmo Marconi had demonstrated the existence of radio waves, Hughes was already transmitting and receiving electromagnetic waves over several hundred metres. At the time his work failed to satisfy