History of electrical engineering
[2] Patients with ailments such as gout or headache were directed to touch electric fish in the hope that the powerful jolt might cure them.
Thales of Miletus, an ancient Greek philosopher, writing at around 600 BCE, described a form of static electricity, noting that rubbing fur on various substances, such as amber, would cause a particular attraction between the two.
[5][6] An object found in Iraq in 1938, dated to about 250 BCE and called the Baghdad Battery, resembles a galvanic cell and is claimed by some to have been used for electroplating in Mesopotamia, although there is no evidence for this.
[11] By 1705, Francis Hauksbee had discovered that if he placed a small amount of mercury in the glass of his modified version of Otto von Guericke's generator, evacuated the air from it to create a mild vacuum and rubbed the ball to build up a charge, a glow was visible if he placed his hand on the outside of the ball.
[10] In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research in electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work.
In 1791, Italian Luigi Galvani published his discovery of bioelectricity, demonstrating that electricity was the medium by which nerve cells passed signals to the muscles.
[10][16][17] Alessandro Volta's battery, or voltaic pile, of 1800, made from alternating layers of zinc and copper, provided scientists with a more reliable source of electrical energy than the electrostatic machines previously used.
[19] Electromagnets were then used in the first practical engineering application of electricity by William Fothergill Cooke and Charles Wheatstone who co-developed a telegraph system that used a number of needles on a board which were moved to point to letters of the alphabet.
Notable developments early in this century include the work of Georg Ohm, who in 1827 quantified the relationship between the electric current and potential difference in a conductor, Michael Faraday, the discoverer of electromagnetic induction in 1831.
In the same year, under Professor Charles Cross, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began offering the first option of Electrical Engineering within a physics department.
Engineering advances in the 1880s, including the invention of the transformer, led to electric utilities starting to adopting alternating current, up until then used primarily in arc lighting systems, as a distribution standard for outdoor and indoor lighting (eventually replacing direct current for such purposes).
[30] "By the mid-1890s the four "Maxwell equations" were recognized as the foundation of one of the strongest and most successful theories in all of physics; they had taken their place as companions, even rivals, to Newton's laws of mechanics.
The equations were by then also being put to practical use, most dramatically in the emerging new technology of radio communications, but also in the telegraph, telephone, and electric power industries.
[32] Charles Proteus Steinmetz helped foster the development of alternating current that made possible the expansion of the electric power industry in the United States, formulating mathematical theories for engineers.
Millimetre wave communication was first investigated by Jagadish Chandra Bose during 1894–1896, when he reached an extremely high frequency of up to 60 GHz in his experiments.
Reginald Fessenden recognized that a continuous wave needed to be generated to make speech transmission possible, and by the end of 1906 he sent the first radio broadcast of voice.
Also in 1906, Robert von Lieben and Lee De Forest independently developed the amplifier tube, called the triode.
[40] The second world war saw tremendous advances in the field of electronics; especially in radar and with the invention of the magnetron by Randall and Boot at the University of Birmingham in 1940.
An early electronic computing device, Colossus was built by Tommy Flowers of the GPO to decipher the coded messages of the German Lorenz cipher machine.
An American invention at the time was a device to scramble the telephone calls between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
A great amount of work was undertaken in the United States as part of the War Training Program in the areas of radio direction finding, pulsed linear networks, frequency modulation, vacuum tube circuits, transmission line theory and fundamentals of electromagnetic engineering.
[41] Prior to the Second World War, the subject was commonly known as 'radio engineering' and was primarily restricted to aspects of communications and radar, commercial radio and early television.
Later, in post war years, as consumer devices began to be developed, the field broadened to include modern TV, audio systems, Hi-Fi and latterly computers and microprocessors.
The arithmetic performance of these machines allowed engineers to develop completely new technologies and achieve new objectives, including the Apollo missions and the NASA Moon landing.
[58] The earliest experimental MOS IC chip to be fabricated was built by Fred Heiman and Steven Hofstein at RCA Laboratories in 1962.
