David Edward Hughes
Inventor
David Edward Hughes (16 May 1830 – 22 January 1900) was a Welsh-American inventor and professor of music, best known for his pioneering work on the printing telegraph and the microphone. Most standard biographical sources record him as most likely born in London, though his family had strong roots in Corwen, Denbighshire, and moved around during his childhood before emigrating to the United States, where he grew up and became a professor of music in Kentucky. The exact place of his birth is not settled beyond doubt, and this page states that honestly rather than presenting Corwen as a confirmed fact.
In 1855 Hughes patented a printing telegraph, a major advance in long-distance communication that saw widespread adoption in Europe. He returned to London in 1857 and continued experimenting, developing an improved carbon microphone in 1878 that became central to early telephone technology. In 1879 he became the first person known to have transmitted and received radio waves, using a spark-gap transmitter of his own design, though he did not publish his findings to the standard required for scientific credit at the time — that recognition went instead to the German physicist Heinrich Hertz eight years later.
Hughes was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1880 in recognition of his work, and continued inventing and experimenting until his death in London on 22 January 1900.