In 1849, TKK was established in Helsinki by the decree of the Russian Emperor Nicholas I, Grand Duke of Finland as a "manufacture and handicraft school", with the name Helsingin teknillinen reaalikoulu/Helsingfors tekniska realskola, along with two other similar schools, situated in Vaasa and Turku.

[1][2] As the proportion of matriculation diploma holders in the student intake gradually increased, the school gained more social respectability.

Additionally, TKK participated in various joint units with other Finnish universities and the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland: TKK participated in 12 Centres of Excellence (huippuyksikkö), selected by the Academy of Finland to represent the top research in the country and receiving separate, fixed-period funding from the Academy.

Researchers at TKK have achieved notability in, among other things, low temperature physics (holding the current world record for the lowest temperature achieved), the development of devices and methods for magnetoencephalography, mobile communications, wood processing, and neural networks, with professor Teuvo Kohonen initiating research in self-organizing maps.

Additionally, the first commercialised total synthesis, the synthesis of camphor, was invented by Gustaf Komppa, the first professor of chemistry at TKK[39] and the Nobel laureate (chemistry, 1945) Artturi Virtanen held a professorship in biochemistry at TKK.

Several high-tech companies, the Finnish forest industry's joint experimental laboratory KCL, and business incubators Innopoli and Technopolis are also situated there.

It is also directly adjacent to Keilaniemi, with Life Science Center and the headquarters of several notable Finnish companies, such as Nokia and Fortum.

Their most widely publicised stunt took place in 1961, when a team of students smuggled a statue of Paavo Nurmi onto the 300-year-old wreck of Regalskeppet Vasa just days before its lifting from the bottom of the sea.

TKK was also one of the two universities in Finland to host one or more nations, a Finnish type of student corporation.

The regional Finnish-speaking nations at the University of Helsinki also accepted TKK students as members.

[47] Construction of the Otaniemi campus was started in 1950, in order for the first buildings to host the athletes of the 1952 Summer Olympics in Helsinki.

The quality of the Otaniemi student housing holds a high standard in international comparison.

The ownership of the property was later transferred from the student union to the university itself, due to high maintenance costs.