Every call you've ever made via FaceTime, every recording you've ever saved as a voice memo, every muffled conversation over Zoom, every TikTok voiceover: odds are, the audio is funneled through some sort of piece of technology that most people have never even heard of, and which was the result of an early lab mishap in 1962. According to a 1962 original research paper titled “Self‐Biased Condenser Microphone with High Capacitance,” published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Bell Labs scientists Gerhard Sessler and James West described a "new kind of condenser microphone with solid dielectric between the electrodes," a device which didn't require a large power source to operate. This paper, brief and unimpressive-sounding as it may seem, would come to define the microphone technology utilized by almost everyone today.
A faulty headphone, and a happy accident
