Electrical Engineering - A Short History

It all started with static electricity. Yeah -- the stuff that makes your socks stick to your pants.

You probably take it for granted. You know static electricity when you see it, right? But before the 1500s, nobody had clothes dryers, so finding static electricity wasn't as simple as doing a load of laundry. Fortunately, William Gilbert -- the father of modern electrical engineering services -- came along to show us the light.

Gilbert was, in all likelihood, the world's first electrical engineer. He invented the versorium, a device that could tell the difference between charged and non-charged objects. Basically a metal needle mounted on a base, it would spin toward charged objects, indicating that they were carrying some amount of static electricity. And while you probably won't find a versorium an electrical engineer's toolbox, it did eventually evolve into the electroscope -- a device an electrical engineer might use to detect an electric charge's magnitude.

With the exception of a few relatively important discoveries, electrical engineering didn't grow much as a discipline until the 1800s, when Michael Faraday and George Ohm made important new observations and developed a few new theories. Then, in the later part of that century, the "War of Currents" came along, which pit electrical engineer against electrical engineer, scientist against scientist, and brother against brother.

Well, maybe not brother against brother. But the War of Currents was a pretty big deal. It began when Thomas Edison -- famous for inventing the phonograph, the light bulb, and about 50 other important tools of the modern age -- embraced the standard direct-current, or DC, method of power distribution. In direct-current, which is produced by dynamos and batteries, the flow of an electrical charge is unidirectional.

But not every electrical engineer embraced DC. George Westinghouse, who built a fortune on America's railroads, put his weight -- and his considerable bank account -- behind the development of a power network based on an alternating current. AC, Westinghouse believed, was a more efficient transmission method.

In the end, most electrical engineers saw the light, and got on the side of AC. Even Edison changed sides -- right before he died.

Also on the side of AC was Nikola Tesla. Tesla was not only one of the most prolific electrical engineers in history, he was an eccentric man, obsessed with pigeons and maintaining his own celibacy. His work formed the basis of AC power. Because of his memorable oddities, he has become a fixture in modern films, comic books and works of science fiction, including the 2006 film The Prestige -- perhaps the most successful film to date with an electrical engineer figuring so centrally to its plot.

Electrical engineering expanded greatly in the 20th Century. The radio was already in common use by 1900, thanks in large part to Nikola Tesla, and it became even more useful as electrical engineers made improvements to it. Guglielmo Marconi invented the telegraph, making radio useful worldwide and developing the first transatlantic radio transmissions. By World War II, radio was essential to communications and guidance.

The rest, as they say, is history. When the integrated circuit was developed in 1958, it opened the door to electronic engineering. After that came the microprocessor, the personal computer, and various signal and control systems. And it all started with static electricity.

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