If you’ve ever used a cellphone, hearing aid, or baby monitor, listened to live or recorded music, or recorded anything yourself, you’re indebted to James West.

West is the co-inventor of the electret microphone used in all of those devices and more. It’s estimated that over 90 percent of the microphones in use today are electret mics, and more than 2 billion of these devices are produced worldwide every year. The electret microphone’s usefulness is matched only by its longevity. While it has been refined over the years, the basic technology is virtually identical to what West and Gerhard Sessler invented at Bell Labs in the early 1960s.

Today, this invention's success is only matched by legacy of its inventor. After his groundbreaking work, West went on to become an internationally-recognized electrical engineer. He holds more than 40 US and over 200 international patents. He has been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and the National Academy of Engineering. His many awards include the Acoustical Society of America’s Gold Medal, the George Stiglitz Trophy from AT&T, the Benjamin Franklin Medal Award in Electrical Engineering, and the US National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

Looking for an outlet

West was born in 1931 in a house built by his grandfather. His grandmother had been a slave, and he grew up in a town of about 3,000 people that became infamous for its racism. Public school education for black children in Farmville, Virginia was a disgrace, but West overcame these barriers imposed by prejudice through a determination to learn and a family that recognized the value of education. He remains an active proponent of opening up education and opportunity to everyone as a way to benefit society as a whole.

West got into trouble as a child because he was always taking things apart to see how they worked. Speaking to Historymakers, West said one of his earliest memories involves dismantling his grandfather’s watch and discovering that it had 107 different pieces. He also remembers that he couldn’t put them back together again, which didn’t go over well with his parents and grandparents. His caretakers and teachers quickly realized that West was less likely to wreak havoc if they provided an outlet for his insatiable curiosity.

West was looking for a different kind of outlet on a humid August day when he was eight-years-old. He wanted to plug in a discarded radio he found to see if it worked. He climbed up on the brass headboard of a bed so he could reach an outlet in a light fixture on the ceiling. The shock that hit him when he touched the socket was strong enough to freeze him in place. “My whole body was rattling," he later told Johns Hopkins Magazine. Luckily, West's brother saw something was wrong and knocked him off the headboard to break the connection.

Many people would be afraid of electricity after an experience like this, but not West. He had a burning need to know what had happened. Describing the experience later, he said that when things happen that he doesn’t understand...

...I have to figure them out. I have to learn. And that's essentially what led to some of the discoveries that I made, you know, the curiosity. Well, why does nature behave in that way? You know, what are the compelling parameters around the way nature behaves? And how can I better understand the physical principles that I'm dealing with? You know, it's still a big part of my life.

West never lost interest in electricity. Four years later at the age of 12, he was wiring houses alongside his cousin. Twenty-three years later, he co-invented the electret microphone.

The electret microphone

West was a grad student in the physics department at Temple University in the 1950s when he answered an ad for a summer intern at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey. At this time Bell Labs was about as close to nirvana as a scientist or engineer could get. Basic research was vigorously pursued and cross-field collaboration was encouraged. The transistor, the laser, the first communication satellite (Telstar), the first modern solar cell, the metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), information theory and the theory of modern cryptography (both developed by Claude Shannon), the Unix operating system, and the programming languages C and C++ all came out of Bell Labs along with the electret microphone.

Bell Labs suggested that West should work in the acoustics research department. There, he joined a project that hoped to identify the minimum amount of time two short-duration sounds have to be separated for people to hear two distinct sounds. West didn’t know anything about human acoustics, but he “knew where the library was” as he told Historymakers.

The headphones that the group was using to test human hearing had a problem. These headphones used one-inch diameter condenser microphones that produced unmeasurably low levels of distortion over a wide frequency range but could only produce a very weak signal that many people cannot hear. This greatly limited the number of people who could be tested and raised questions about whether the project’s findings could be generalized to the larger population of people with normal hearing.

West solved the problem by designing a microphone that used a dielectric material that becomes polarized when exposed to a strong electric field. He was able to build a set of headphones capable of producing sound at a level anyone could hear because dielectric mics do not have the size limitations of the condenser mics the project had been using.

The following November, West was back in graduate school at Temple when Bell Labs reached out again. The headphones he built had stopped working, and no one knew why. West set school aside, returned to Bell Labs, and began looking for a solution with Gerhard Sessler.

The duo quickly discovered that the headphones’ dielectric polymer needed its polarity reversed periodically in order to maintain its charge. While they were reversing the polarity on the 500-volt battery that powered the headphones, they inadvertently produced a power surge by shorting out the leads to the microphone. The results were totally unexpected. Instead of the power surge frying the mic, the mic now worked without a connection to the battery. Although they didn’t realize it, West and Sessler had created an electret. West was essentially back where he was that day he got zapped on the brass headboard—something mysterious was going on, and he had to figure out what it was.

An electret is a dielectric material that will hold an electric charge over a period of time. Electrets were known long before West and Sessler began working with them, and they had been used for microphones before. However, the technology was impractical for commercial use because, under normal temperatures, the dipolar materials used to make the electret lost their charge in a matter of months. Rather than work with dipoles, West and Sessler began exploring neutral polymers that would take an electric charge under carefully controlled conditions and hold that charge for a long time. They found the ideal material in Teflon, which will hold a charge at normal temperatures for several hundred years.

West and Sessler revolutionized the microphone industry when they published their work in 1964. The condenser mics that were the state of the art when West began at Bell Labs cost hundreds of dollars. An electret microphone that produces the same flat response across a wide range of frequencies and operating conditions could be built for pennies. Sony produced the first commercial electret microphones in 1968, and they soon became the industry standard.

The electret microphone was only the beginning of West’s scientific career. He has worked with NASA on using electret transducers to accurately measure heart and lung function in noisy environments like orbital spacecraft. West has also worked with the Johns Hopkins Hospital to safely reduce the noise level in hospitals by developing a covering for sound absorbent material that is porous to sound but not to bacteria. Currently, West is working with the Bill Gates Foundation to develop sensors that will detect harmful particles in the air that are are produced by third-world cooking methods; the particles are thought to be a leading cause of infant mortality in the developing world.

Today, science isn’t the only thing driving West to continue his work. He's also dedicated to increasing education and opportunity for underprivileged students.