July 1878: The invention of the microphone

In a fascinating insight into one of the key inventions of the modern world, one of the two competing inventors of the microphone took to the pages of The Engineer to argue his case. Furious at the attempt of the renowned American inventor Thomas Alva Edison to claim the microphone as one of his battery of new technologies, Prof David Edward Hughes, a Welsh scientist and musician who had emigrated to the US with is family at the age of seven, wrote to our predecessors to denounce Edison and claim the invention as his own.

Now relatively unknown, Hughes was a prolific inventor in his own right. An experimental physicist specialising in signal processing, he invented a printing telegraph system in 1855 which was the fore-runner to today’s modems, and in 1879 discovered that sparks generated a radio signal that could be listened to using a telephone receiver and developed a spark-gap device to send Morse code; now believed to be the first radio signal transmitter. Among his other inventions was the semiconductor diode in the crystal radio. He was also an accomplished harpist, a virtuoso, reportedly, from the age of 6.