Re: headset

[chrisw@wwa.com (Chris Williams)]

>Misho Imblum wrote:
>> 
>> Chris Williams wrote:
>> >
>> >    She did! In the "Kate Bush On Tour" TV film, Kate talks about how
>> > she wanted "...something like a telephonist's headset". Her
>> soundman,
>> > a Scottish fellow, built it out of a coat hanger and a small
>> tie-tack
>> > type microphone. It looks like a Sony ECM-50. It definitly was not
>> > off the shelf. I was doing sound at the time, and I believe she was
>> > the very first person to use one. I consider Kate the inventor of
>> the
>> > performance headset microphone.
>> >
>> 
>> I was also working sound when I first saw Kate and her headset.  I
>> believe it is pretty much commonly accepted by now that, while Kate
>> herself was not the inventor of the headset mic as we know it, she was
>> the instigator, and the engineers working with her at the time are
>> responsible for its start.  I do hope they are being compensated in
>> some
>> way, through patents or whatever.
>> 
>> Misho
>
>--Perhaps a legend is being born: Do you suppose this will soon rank up
>there with Hedy Lamarr "inventing" spread-spectrum communication?

   No quotes necessary. Hedy did invent it and patented it. The technology
of the time made the idea difficult to implement (a sort of player piano
mechanism with the punched roll to select frequencies). But the idea
is the vital thing. She tried to give it to the US military and the
dunderheads in charge turned her down. It could have been as devastating
to the Axis powers as the Enigma Machine had been to the Allies.

   

Chris Williams of
   Chris'n'Vickie of Chicago
      chrisw@wwa.com
"How perfectly goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" - C. Crumb