The Work of Edward Christopher Wente

For the past twenty years Dr. Edward Christopher Wente has been engaged at the Bell Telephone Laboratories and its predecessor organization in acoustical problems and in the development of special types of acoustical devices. One of the early problems upon which he worked was the development of a high-quality microphone that would translate sound into corresponding electrical currents with a degree of fidelity not previously approached. Microphones available at the time, while successful in telephony, were unsatisfactory for the transmission of music or the more subtle characteristics of the-voice, upon which the success of actors and public speakers so largely depended. This problem was successfully met in the condenser microphone, which depends for its action upon the change of electrical capacity between a metal diaphragm and a metal plate as the diaphragm vibrates. Microphones of this type are used extensively at the present time not only for recording sound for motion pictures but also for broadcasting and recording phonograph records. They have been invaluable in fundamental studies of the characteristics of speech and music, and are part of the international reference system for telephony. The John Price Wetherill Medal was awarded to Dr. Wente by the Franklin Institute in recognition of this work.