Dr. JAMES EDWARD MACEO WEST
February 10, 1931, Farmville, VA
Inventor and Acoustician. Along with Gerhard Sessler, West developed the foil electret microphone in 1962 while developing instruments for human hearing research. He is also the founder of the Association of Black Laboratory Employees
EDUCATION:Temple University
AWARDS: National Medal of Technology and Innovation, Benjamin Franklin Medal
Ninety percent of microphones used today are based on the ingenuity of James Edward West, an
African-American inventor born in 1931 in Prince Edwards County, VA. If you’ve ever talked on the
telephone, you’ve probably used his invention. West started at Bell labs as an intern and joined them
full-time in 1957 after graduating from Temple University. As the inventor of the microphone, James
West has received numerous awards and honors including a Fellow of IEEE, Industrial Research
Institute’s 1998 Achievement Award, 1995 Inventor of the Year from the State of New Jersey and
induction in the Inventors Hall of Fame in 1999. James E. West holds 47 US patents and more than 200
foreign patents from his 40-year career with Bell Laboratories.
During his career, West also involved
himself with programs designed to encourage minorities to take more of a role in the sciences. In the
1970’s, he was a member of the Association of Black Laboratories Employees (ABLE) at Bell Labs that
influenced management to fund the Summer Research Program (SRP) and Cooperate Research
Fellowship Program (CRFP) – programs that helped more than 500 non-white students graduate with
degrees in science, engineering and mathematics