Microphone
German inventor Johann Philipp Reis designed an early sound transmitter that used a metallic strip attached to a vibrating membrane that would produce intermittent current. Better results were achieved with the "liquid transmitter" design in Scottish-American Alexander Graham Bell's telephone of 1876 – the diaphragm was attached to a conductive rod in an acid solution. These systems, however, gave a very poor sound quality.
The first microphone that enabled proper voice telephony was the (loose-contact) carbon microphone. This was independently developed by David Edward Hughes in England and Emile Berliner and Thomas Edison in the US. Although Edison was awarded the first patent (after a long legal dispute) in mid-1877, Hughes had demonstrated his working device in front of many witnesses some years earlier, and most historians credit him with its invention. The carbon microphone is the direct prototype of today's microphones and was critical in the development of telephony, broadcasting and the recording industries. Thomas Edison refined the carbon microphone into his carbon-button transmitter of 1886. This microphone was employed at the first ever radio broadcast, a performance at the New York Metropolitan Opera House in 1910.
In 1916, E.C. Wente of Western Electric developed the next breakthrough with the first condenser microphone. In 1923, the first practical moving coil microphone was built. The Marconi-Sykes magnetophone, developed by Captain H. J. Round, became the standard for BBC studios in London. This was improved in 1930 by Alan Blumlein and Herbert Holman who released the HB1A and was the best standard of the day.
History of science and technology in Japan
The first full-frame DSLR cameras were developed in Japan from around 2000 to 2002: the MZ-D by Pentax, the N Digital by Contax's Japanese R6D team, and the EOS-1Ds by Canon.In 1982, JVC and Sony announced the first camcorders, as CAMera/reCORDER combinations. That year, Sony released the first camcorder, the Betacam system, for professional use. In 1983, Sony released the first consumer camcorder, the Betamovie BMC-100P, and JVC released the first VHS-C camcorder.In 2000, Sharp Corporation introduced the world's first camera phone, the J-SH04 J-Phone, in Japan.In 1876, two Japanese students, Shuji Izawa and Kentaro Kaneko, participated in Alexander Graham Bell's experiments with early telephony, immediately after Bell invented the telephone. According to Bell, this made Japanese the second language spoken through a telephone, after English.While working at Tohoku University, Jun-ichi Nishizawa proposed fiber-optic communication, the use of optical fibers for optical communication, in 1963. Nishizawa invented other technologies that contributed to the development of optical fiber communications, such as the graded-index optical fiber as a channel for transmitting light from semiconductor lasers. He patented the graded-index optical fiber in 1964. The solid-state optical fiber was invented by Nishizawa in 1964.