History of electrical engineering
Electrical engineering |
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This article details the history of electrical engineering.
Ancient developments
Long before any knowledge of electricity existed, people were aware of shocks from
Ancient cultures around the Mediterranean knew that certain objects, such as rods of amber, could be rubbed with cat's fur to attract light objects like feathers. 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. He noted that the amber buttons could attract light objects such as hair and that if they rubbed the amber for long enough they could even get a spark to jump.
At around 450 BCE
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.
17th-century developments
Electricity would remain little more than an intellectual curiosity for millennia. In 1600, the English scientist,
Further work was conducted by Otto von Guericke who showed electrostatic repulsion. Robert Boyle also published work.[10]
18th-century developments
Though electrical phenomena had been known for centuries, in the 18th century, the systematic study of electricity became known as "the youngest of the sciences", and the public became electrified by the newest discoveries in the field.[11]
By 1705,
Hauksbee continued to experiment with electricity, making numerous observations and developing machines to generate and demonstrate various electrical phenomena. In 1709 he published Physico-Mechanical Experiments on Various Subjects which summarized much of his scientific work.
In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin conducted extensive research in electricity, selling his possessions to fund his work. In June 1752 he is reputed to have attached a metal key to the bottom of a dampened kite string and flown the kite in a storm-threatened sky.[14] A succession of sparks jumping from the key to the back of his hand showed that lightning was indeed electrical in nature.[15] He also explained the apparently paradoxical behavior of the Leyden jar as a device for storing large amounts of electrical charge, by coming up with the single fluid, two states theory of electricity.
In 1791, Italian
19th-century developments
The first application of electricity that was put to practical use was electromagnetism.[18] William Sturgeon invented the electromagnet in 1825.[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. A five needle system was used initially, but was given up as too expensive. In 1838 an improvement reduced the number of needles to two, and a patent for this version was taken out by Cooke and Wheatstone.[20] Cooke tested the invention, with the
Electrical engineering became a profession in the late 19th century. Practitioners had created a global
Development of the scientific basis for electrical engineering, using research techniques, intensified during the 19th century. Notable developments early in this century include the work of
In 1873, James Clerk Maxwell published a unified treatment of electricity and magnetism in A Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism which stimulated several theorists to think in terms of fields described by Maxwell's equations. In 1878, the British inventor James Wimshurst developed an apparatus that had two glass disks mounted on two shafts. It was not until 1883 that the Wimshurst machine was more fully reported to the scientific community.
During the latter part of the 1800s, the study of electricity was largely considered to be a subfield of physics. It was not until the late 19th century that universities started to offer degrees in electrical engineering. In 1882,
During this period commercial use of electricity increased dramatically. Starting in the late 1870s cities started installing large scale electric street lighting systems based on
"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."[31] By the end of the 19th century, figures in the progress of electrical engineering were beginning to emerge.[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.
Emergence of radio and electronics
During the
20th-century developments
John Fleming invented the first radio tube, the diode, in 1904.
In the early 1920s, there was a growing interest in the development of domestic applications for electricity.[39] Public interest led to exhibitions such featuring "homes of the future" and in the UK, the Electrical Association for Women was established with Caroline Haslett as its director in 1924 to encourage women to become involved in electrical engineering.[40]
World War II years
The second world war saw tremendous advances in the field of electronics; especially in
An American invention at the time was a device to scramble the telephone calls between Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt. This was called the Green Hornet system and worked by inserting noise into the signal. The noise was then extracted at the receiving end. This system was never broken by the Germans.
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,
In 1941 Konrad Zuse presented the Z3, the world's first fully functional and programmable computer.[41]
Post-war years
Prior to the
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. In 1946 the
In the mid-to-late 1950s, the term radio engineering gradually gave way to the name
Solid-state electronics
The first working
The first integrated circuits were the hybrid integrated circuit invented by Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments in 1958 and the monolithic integrated circuit chip invented by Robert Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959.[47]
The
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Walter Brattain – transistor(1947)
-
passivation (1957) and MOSFETtransistor (1959)
-
monolithic integrated circuitchip (1959)
-
silicon-gate MOSFET (1968) and microprocessor(1971)
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Marcian Hoff – microprocessor (1971)
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Masatoshi Shima, Stanley Mazor – microprocessor (1971)
The MOSFET made it possible to build
The
The development of MOS integrated circuit technology in the 1960s led to the invention of the microprocessor in the early 1970s.[64][65] The first single-chip microprocessor was the Intel 4004, released in 1971.[64][66] The Intel 4004 was designed and realized by Federico Faggin at Intel with his silicon-gate MOS technology,[64] along with Intel's Marcian Hoff and Stanley Mazor and Busicom's Masatoshi Shima.[67] This ignited the development of the personal computer. The 4004, a 4-bit processor, was followed in 1973 by the Intel 8080, an 8-bit processor, which made possible the building of the first personal computer, the Altair 8800.[68]
See also
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The metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) is the most commonly used active device in the very large-scale integration of digital integrated circuits (VLSI). During the 1970s these components revolutionized electronic signal processing, control systems and computers.
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Sources
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External links
History of electrical engineering.
- Nobel Prize Awards Related to Electrical Engineering (relevant patents included)
- Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity – Jim Al-Khalili BBC Horizon
- Electrickery, BBC Radio 4 discussion with Simon Schaffer, Patricia Fara & Iwan Morus (In Our Time, November 4, 2004)