Ancient Greek actors amplified their voices with horn-mouthed masks
In fifth-century BC Greece, theatre masks had horn-shaped mouth openings that acted as acoustic megaphones, pushing actors' voices across open-air amphitheatres. More than two thousand years later, inventors began turning sound into electricity instead, and the credit for the first practical microphone is still disputed.
Between 1664 and 1685 Robert Hooke became the first to send sound through something other than air, stretching a wire between two cups in what we now call a tin-can telephone. In 1856 the Italian inventor Antonio Meucci built a dynamic microphone that moved a wire coil through a magnetic field to generate a current, a principle that endured in telephones. Johann Philipp Reis's transmitter of 1861 and the liquid transmitters of Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray in 1876 worked, but sounded poor.
Proper voice telephony arrived with the loose-contact carbon microphone, developed independently by David Hughes in England and by Emile Berliner and Thomas Edison in the United States. Edison secured the earliest patent, dated to mid-1877, following protracted litigation, but Hughes had demonstrated a working device before many witnesses years earlier, and most historians credit him. Berliner's design found commercial success in Bell's telephone.
E. C. Wente of Western Electric invented the condenser microphone in 1916. Its diaphragm forms one plate of a capacitor, so vibrations change the gap and therefore the capacitance; because so little mass has to move, the signal is detailed, which is why studios favour the type. It needs power, supplied as phantom power or from a battery. The first practical moving-coil microphone came in 1923, as did the ribbon microphone, believed to be Harry F. Olson's work. A Marconi-Sykes magnetophone designed by H. J. Round became the BBC's studio standard.
Two designs defined later recording. The Neumann U 47 of 1949 was the first studio condenser with a large dual-diaphragm capsule, switchable pickup patterns and a vacuum tube amplifier. The rugged Shure SM57 of 1965, small enough to sit beside drums and amplifiers, became one of the best-selling microphones in history. In between, Electro-Voice won an Academy Award for its 1963 shotgun microphone.
Source: Microphone
