standard. Microphone In 1878 Hughes published his work on the effects of sound on the powered electronic sound pickups, called "transmitters", being developed for telephones. He showed that the change in resistance in carbon telephone transmitters was a result of the interaction between carbon parts instead of the commonly held theory that it was from the compression of the carbon itself. Based on its ability to pick up extremely weak sounds, Hughes referred to it as a "microphone effect" (using a word coined by Charles Wheatstone in 1827 for a mechanical sound amplifier). He conducted a simple demonstration of this principle of loose contact by laying an iron nail across two other nails connected to a battery and galvanometer. His paper was read before the Royal Society of London by Thomas Henry Huxley on May 8, 1878, and his new "microphone" was covered in the July 1 edition of Telegraph Journal and Electrical Review. Hughes published his work during the time that Thomas Edison was working on a carbon telephone transmitter and Emile Berliner was working on a loose-contact transmitter. Both Hughes and Edison may have based their work on Philipp Reis' telephone work. Hughes would refine his microphone design using a series of "carbon pencils" stuck into blocks of carbon to better pick up sound but never patented his work, thinking it should be publicly available for development by others. Probable pre-Hertz radio wave detection Hughes seems to have come across the phenomenon of radio waves nine years before they were proven to exist by Heinrich Hertz in 1888. In 1879 while working in London Hughes discovered that a bad contact in a Bell telephone he was using in his experiments seemed to be sparking when he worked on a nearby induction balance. He developed an improved detector to pick up this unknown "extra current" based on his new microphone design and developed a way to interrupt his induction balance via a clockwork mechanism to produce a series of sparks. By trial and error experiments he eventually found he could pick up these "aerial waves" as he carried his telephone device down the street out to a range of . On February 20, 1880, he demonstrated his technology to representatives of the Royal Society including Thomas Henry Huxley, Sir George Gabriel Stokes, and William Spottiswoode, then president of the Society. Stokes was convinced the phenomenon Hughes was demonstrating was