David Edward Hughes

David Edward Hughes was a Welsh-American inventor, practical experimenter and professor of music, born on 16 May 1830 and known for his work on the printing telegraph and the microphone. He is generally considered to have been born in London, but his family moved around that time and he may have been born in Corwen, Wales. His family moved to the United States while he was a child and he became a professor of music in Kentucky, where in 1855 he patented a printing telegraph. He moved back to London in 1857 and went on to invent an improved carbon microphone in 1878. In 1879 he noticed that electric sparks generated in one device could be heard in a separate portable microphone apparatus, which was most probably radio transmission, but he was persuaded by others that it was simply electromagnetic induction, nine years before electromagnetic radiation was a proven concept. He demonstrated his technology to representatives of the Royal Society in 1880, and after his death on 22 January 1900 the Royal Society created the Hughes Medal in his honour.