In 1600, William Gilbert picked up on the work of Thales of Miletus and invented the versorium, an early electrometer. He also coined the word electricus (“of amber”). Over the next two centuries, the work of Stephen Gray, C.F. du Fay, Benjamin Franklin, Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta, Georg Ohm, Michael Faraday, and others laid the groundwork for practical applications, the first large-scale one being the telegraph in the first half of the 19th century.
Samuel Morse was behind one particularly successful implementation of the telegraph, but he was no electrical engineer. An artist, he became interested in the instantaneous communication that electricity might enable when, while painting a portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette in New York, he belatedly learned of the sudden illness and death of his wife in Connecticut.
Delivering a keynote address at DesignCon in January, Thomas H. Lee, professor of electrical engineering at Stanford University, placed the birth of electrical engineering near the time of the completion of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable. The effort was driven in part by Cyrus West Field, who had made a fortune turning around a failing paper mill. William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) contributed the mirror galvanometer, which could detect weak signals at the receiving end.
The first cable, completed in 1858, was not a success. Performance went from poor to worse due to deterioration of the insulation, exacerbated by the insistence of Edward Orange Wildman Whitehouse, trained as a medical doctor, that the transmit voltage be boosted to 1,500 V.
At that point, Lee said, “cable denial” set in, and investors began to think Field had defrauded them. They could no longer tolerate the tinkerers and dabblers like Whitehouse and Morse. (According to Lee, Morse had offered the less than helpful advice that a successful cable would need a small-diameter center conductor—a large conductor would—for reasons Morse did not make clear—slow down the electricity.) Investors wanted solid, scientific evidence that a new cable would work before putting up more money.
They got it from participants like Thomson, who realized they even lacked the vocabulary to describe what had caused the original failure. They formally defined the volt, ampere, and ohm. Thomson realized that the cable would need to be large to minimize attenuation, and he estimated the cable could handle five words per minute. As Lee put it, he calculated—he didn’t guess. The cable was completed in 1886, able to handle up to eight words per minute, possibly with the help of data-compression techniques employed by the telegraph operators.
As work on the cables proceeded, Maxwell was publishing his equations (completed by 1862), and universities started recognizing electrical engineering as a discipline distinct from physics. In 1882, MIT began offering an EE option within the physics department, and Technische Universität Darmstadt (TU Darmstadt) established a chair in electrical engineering. Other institutions followed, leading to the tremendous accomplishments in the field throughout the 20th century and into this one.
Lee concluded his DesignCon keynote address by asking, “What’s next? The Internet of Things? Telepathy? Who knows, but history is not over.” Whatever is next, he advised attendees, “You’re going to be making it.”
Rick Nelson,
Executive Editor