James Edward Maceo West

James Edward Maceo West ( born February 10, 1931 Prince Edward County, Virginia) is an American acoustic and is considered along with Gerhard Sessler as the inventor of the electret microphone.

His parents were Jim West and the teacher Matilda West. Jim began at the early age of electrical phenomena to be interested after he found an old radio, and had suffered an electric shock. At the age of 12 he helped his cousin when wiring houses.

After high school, he started at the request of parents as a pre -medical student at Hampton University, but was drafted into the Korean War, where he received the Purple Heart. He then moved to Temple University and solid state physics. He began in the summer holidays as an intern at Bell Labs, where he was in 1957 fixed after completing his Bachelor of Science degree. Here he developed with Gerhard Sessler, the first foil electret microphone, which they in 1962, U.S. Patent 3,118,022 anmeldeten (1964 allotted ).

He also developed microphones with adaptive Nahbesprechungscharakteristik, first and second order differential microphones, blood pressure monitoring sensors, broadband phone receiver and microphone arrays.

In addition to his work on converters he also made important contributions to the room acoustics. In the article Contributions to the acoustics of concert halls with Sessler from 1964, he defined the seat effect (attenuation of low to medium frequencies by rows of seats ).

He has published over 100 scientific articles, has received 47 U.S. patents and over 200 foreign patents. For his work on electro-acoustic transducers, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the National Academy of Engineering. Since 1962 he is a member of the Acoustical Society of America. Since the 1970s he has been with Bell a member of the Association of Black Laboratories Employees (ABLE ).

In 2001 he went with Bell to retire and is now at Johns Hopkins University Research Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Recently, he has dedicated himself to new piezoelectric materials (use of previously unused mechanisms for the generation of dipole moments in polymer composites ), new multi-channel tele -collaboration techniques ( with Fred Juang at the Georgia Institute of Technology ) and the noise in hospitals.

In 2006 he received the National Medals of Technology and Sessler 2010 with the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering.

Swell

• Americans
• Personality of Electrical Engineering
• Born in 1931
• Man