Born into a world that told him scientists did not look like him, James E West co-invented the technology inside virtually every microphone on Earth. At 95, he hasn’t stopped yet.
Pick up almost any device that records or transmits the voice and you are holding the life’s work of James E West. The laptop on your desk; the smartphone in your pocket; the wireless earbuds on your commute; the audio sensor in your car’s GPS navigation system; the automatic speech recognition that tells Alexa to order something from Amazon. They all include microphones. Nine in every 10 microphones made anywhere in the world use a technology that West developed with his colleague Gerhard Sessler at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey, US, in 1962. So why isn’t he a household name?
“That’s a good question,” says West, when asked. “And I’m not sure I have a good answer.” He pauses. “I grew up in Bell Labs, and I was surrounded by people who invented things like the laser, the transistor, quantum physics...