Speaking Up
A microphone is a device that converts acoustical power into power driven by electricity with wave characteristics that are similar. A microphone converts sound waves into voltages of electricity that get converted back to sound waves eventually by means of speakers. A microphone was used first with the earliest models of the telephones and then with radio transmissions.
The person to coin the phrase microphone was Sir Charles Wheatstone. He came up with the name in 1827. Born in England in 1802, Wheatstone was an inventor and physicist and he played an important part in Great Britain's telegraph development.
He and William Cooks, another physicist inventor patented their own telegraph in 1837, with the use of electromagnetism principles. This happened about the same time as Samuel Morse came up with his own version of the telegraph. The Morse version was chosen as the standard.
Emile Berliner, a U.S. citizen and German immigrant, was the inventor who transported the microphone to use as a voice transmitter for the telephone. He did this in 1876, after seen a U.S. centennial expo demonstration by Bell telephone. Berliner is also noteworthy as the inventor of the gramophone. He revolutionized the music industry when he patented his sound recording system. He started his "Gramophone Company" which he later sold to Victor (maker of the Victrola), which later changed its name to RCA.
The Bell Telephone was enormously impressed by Berliner's telephone microphone transmitter and bought the patent from him for $50,000.
David Edward Hughes, born in London and raised in the United States, invented the carbon microphone in 1987. It wasn't fully developed until the 1920's however.
Hughes found that if a battery equipped circuit and a telephone receiver had a loose contact between them sounds in the receiver would match the vibrations on the telephone mouthpiece or transmitter discovered that a loose contact in a circuit containing a battery and a telephone receiver created a situation where sounds in the receiver matched the vibrations upon the diaphragm of the telephone mouthpiece or transmitter.
When radio was invented, this heralded in the era of broadcast microphone. In 1942 the ribbon microphone was created for use in radio broadcasting.
James West and Gerhard Sessler, two researchers at Bell Laboratories earned a patent for their 1964 invention of the elecroacoustic transducer, which became an electret microphone. This advanced microphone was very reliable, very precise, less expensive and smaller than the microphone versions that came before it. One billion of this style of microphone were made each year.
In the 1970's a version of microphone was designed. This condenser microphone has a lower sensitivity to sound and produces a recording with a clearer sound.