This month in 1878: Prof David Hughes takes on Thomas Edison in a legendary tussle around their competing inventions of the microphone

摘要

Two prolific inventors, one still famous today, the other less so, clashed in The Engineer over the invention of one of the key technologies of the modern world. In a fascinating insight into the process of invention, 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 US 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 his family at the age of seven, wrote to our predecessors to denounce Edison and claim the invention as his own.