James is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Johns Hopkins University and a pioneer in acoustics, holding over 250 patents related to acoustics and microphones. He tells us how his journey was truly began when he was handed the keys to an empty lab at Temple, a lab that would produce over 50 patents in acoustics.
Transcript
>> My name is James E. West [phonetic]. I'm a professor at Johns Hopkins University in the Department of Electrical Computer Engineering and Mechanical Engineering. My discipline is physics. I'm sorry is acoustics and basically the courses that I teach are in acoustics mainly at the 4 to 500 level where the wave equation is the important equation in acoustics and we try to get students up to the point of being able to understand that equation. Basically describes everything that goes in acoustics. At Bell Labs, [inaudible] and I really learned how to select the proper polymer. Inject charge into that polymer and have those charges trapped in a permanent way, okay? And the field that -- from this trapped electron is looking for [inaudible] because nature likes to have holes and electrons as close together as possible. And so the field from these trapped electrons is enough to buy us a condense microphone. In physics, we think we know everything and although I knew a lot about light and very little about sound, you know I looked at the equations and you change a couple of constants and everything is supposed to work. Well that's the way I thought it worked but it took a little bit more effort than that to really understand what the field of acoustics but that's what I've done over the years.
Download transcript