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The following timeline tables list the discoveries and inventions in the history of electrical and electronic engineering.[1][2]
Year | Event |
---|---|
600 BC | Ancient Greek philosopher Thales of Miletus described static electricity by rubbing fur on substances such as amber. |
1600 | English scientist William Gilbert coined the word electricus after careful experiments. He also explained the magnetism of Earth. |
1660 | German scientist Otto von Guericke invented a device that creates static electricity. This is the first ever electric generator. |
1705 | English scientist Francis Hauksbee made a glass ball that glowed when spun and rubbed with the hand |
1720 | English scientist Stephen Gray made the distinction between insulators and conductors |
1745 | German physicist Ewald Georg von Kleist and Dutch scientist Pieter van Musschenbroek invented Leyden jars |
1752 | American scientist Benjamin Franklin showed that lightning was electrical by flying a kite and explained how Leyden jars work |
1780 | Italian scientist Luigi Galvani discovered Galvanic action in living tissue |
1785 | French physicist Charles-Augustin de Coulomb formulated and published Coulomb's law in his paper Premier Mémoire sur l’Électricité et le Magnétisme |
1785 | French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace developed the Laplace transform to transform a linear differential equation into an algebraic equation. Later, his transform became a tool in circuit analysis. |
1800 | Italian physicist Alessandro Volta invented the battery |
1804 | Thomas Young: Wave theory of light, Vision and color theory |
1808 | Atomic theory by John Dalton |
1816 | English inventor Francis Ronalds built the first working electric telegraph |
1820 | Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted accidentally discovered that an electric field creates a magnetic field |
1820 | One week after Ørsted's discovery, French physicist André-Marie Ampère published his law. He also proposed the right-hand screw rule |
1821 | German scientist Thomas Johann Seebeck discovered thermoelectricity |
1825 | English physicist William Sturgeon developed the first electromagnet |
1827 | German physicist Georg Ohm introduced the concept of electrical resistance |
1831 | English physicist Michael Faraday published the law of induction (Joseph Henry developed the same law independently) |
1831 | American scientist Joseph Henry in the United States developed a prototype DC motor |
1832 | French instrument maker Hippolyte Pixii in France developed a prototype DC generator |
1833 | Michael Faraday developed the laws of electrolysis |
1833 | Michael Faraday invented the thermistor |
1833 | English physicist Samuel Hunter Christie invented the Wheatstone bridge (It is named after Charles Wheatstone who popularized it) |
1836 | Irish priest (and later scientist) Nicholas Callan invented the transformer in Ireland |
1837 | English scientist Edward Davy invented the electric relay |
1839 | French scientist Edmond Becquerel discovered the Photovoltaic Effect |
1844 | American inventor Samuel Morse developed telegraphy and the Morse code |
1844 | Woolrich Generator, the earliest electrical generator used in an industrial process.[3] |
1845 | German physicist Gustav Kirchhoff developed the two laws now known as Kirchhoff's Circuit laws |
1850 | Belgian engineer Floris Nollet invented (and patented) a practical AC generator |
1851 | Heinrich Daniel Ruhmkorff developed the first coil, which he patented in 1851 |
1855 | First utilization of AC (in electrotherapy) by French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne |
1856 | Belgian engineer Charles Bourseul proposed telephony |
1856 | First electrically powered lighthouse in England |
1860 | German scientist Johann Philipp Reis invented the Microphone |
1862 | Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell published the four equations bearing his name |
1866 | The Transatlantic telegraph cable |
1873 | Belgian engineer Zenobe Gramme who developed the DC generator accidentally discovered that a DC generator also works as a DC motor during an exhibit in Vienna. |
1876 | Paper capacitor manufacturing started |
1876 | Russian engineer Pavel Yablochkov invented the electric carbon arc lamp |
1876 | Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone |
1877 | American inventor Thomas Edison invented the phonograph |
1877 | German industrialist Werner von Siemens developed a primitive loudspeaker |
1878 | First electric street lighting in Paris, France |
1878 | First hydroelectric plant in Cragside, England |
1878 | William Crookes invents the Crookes tube, a prototype of Vacuum tubes |
1878 | English engineer Joseph Swan invented the Incandescent light bulb |
1879 | American physicist Edwin Herbert Hall discovered the Hall Effect |
1879 | Thomas Alva Edison introduced a long-lasting filament for the incandescent lamp. |
1880 | French physicists Pierre Curie and Jacques Curie discovered Piezoelectricity |
1882 | First thermal power stations in London and New York |
1887 | German American inventor Emile Berliner invented the gramophone record |
1888 | German physicist Heinrich Hertz proves the existence of electromagnetic waves, including what would come to be called radio waves. |
1888 | Italian physicist and electrical engineer Galileo Ferraris publishes a paper on the induction motor, and Serbian-American engineer Nikola Tesla gets a US patent on the same device[4][5] |
1890 | Thomas Alva Edison invents the fuse |
1893 | During the Fourth International Conference of Electricians in Chicago, electrical units were defined |
1893 | English physicist J. J. Thomson invented waveguides |
1894 | Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi begins developing the first radio wave based wireless telegraphy communication system[6][7] |
1895 | Indian physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose conducts experiments in extremely high frequency millimetre waves using a semiconductor junction to detect radio waves[8][9] |
1895 | In a series of field experiments, Marconi finds that he could transmit radio waves at much greater range than the half-mile maximum physicist of the time were predicting, achieving ranges up to 2 miles (3.2 km) and transmitting over hills[10][11] |
1895 | Russian physicist Alexander Popov finds a use for radio waves, building a radio receiver that can detect lightning strikes[12] |
1895 | Discovery of X-raysbyWilhelm Röntgen |
1896 | Electrolytic capacitor patent was granted to Charles Pollak |
1897 | German inventor Karl Ferdinand Braun invented cathode ray oscilloscope (CRO) |
1901 | First transatlantic radio transmission by Guglielmo Marconi |
1901 | American engineer Peter Cooper Hewitt invented the Fluorescent lamp |
1904 | English engineer John Ambrose Fleming invented the diode |
1906 | American inventor Lee de Forest invented the triode |
1908 | Scottish engineer Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton, laid out the principles of Television. |
1909 | Mica capacitor was invented by William Dubilier |
1911 | Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes discovered Superconductivity |
1912 | American engineer Edwin Howard Armstrong developed the Electronic oscillator |
1915 | French physicist Paul Langevin and Russian engineer Constantin Chilowsky invented sonar |
1917 | American engineer Alexander M. Nicholson invented the crystal oscillator |
1918 | French physicist Henri Abraham and Eugene Bloch invented the multivibrator |
1919 | Edwin Howard Armstrong developed the standard AM radio receiver |
1921 | Metre Convention was extended to include the electrical units |
1921 | Edith Clarke invents the "Clarke calculator", a graphical calculator for solving line equations involving hyperbolic function, allowing electrical engineers to simplify calculations for inductance and capacityinpower transmission lines[13] |
1924 | Japanese engineer Kenjiro Takayanagi began a research program on electronic television[14] |
1925 | Austrian American engineer Julius Edgar Lilienfeld patented the first FET (which became popular much later) |
1926 | Yagi–Uda antenna was developed by the Japanese engineers Hidetsugu Yagi and Shintaro Uda |
1926 | Japanese engineer Kenjiro Takayanagi demonstrated CRT television with 40-line resolution,[15] the first working example of a fully electronic television receiver.[14] |
1927 | Japanese engineer Kenjiro Takayanagi increased television resolution to 100 lines, unrivaled until 1931[16] |
1927 | American engineer Harold Stephen Black invented negative feedback amplifier |
1927 | German Physicist Max Dieckmann invented Video camera tube |
1928 | Raman scattering discovered by Indian physicist C. V. Raman and Indian physicist Kariamanickam Srinivasa Krishnan,[17] providing basis for later Raman laser |
1928 | Japanese engineer Kenjiro Takayanagi was the first to transmit human faces in half-tones on television, influencing the later work of Vladimir K. Zworykin[18] |
1928 | First experimental Television broadcast in the U.S. |
1929 | First public TV broadcast in Germany |
1931 | First wind energy plant in the Soviet Union |
1934 | Akira Nakashima, Claude Shannon and Viktor Shetakov switching circuit theory lays the foundation for digital electronics[19] |
1936 | Dudley E. Foster and Stuart William Seeley developed the FM detector circuit. |
1936 | Austrian engineer Paul Eisler invented the Printed circuit board |
1936 | Scottish Scientist Robert Watson-Watt developed the Radar concept which was proposed earlier. |
1938 | Russian-American engineer Vladimir K. Zworykin developed the Iconoscope |
1939 | Edwin Howard Armstrong developed the FM radio receiver |
1939 | Russell and Sigurd Varian developed the first Klystron tube in the US. |
1941 | German engineer Konrad Zuse developed the first programmable computer in Berlin |
1944 | Scottish Engineer John Logie Baird developed the first color picture tube |
1945 | Transatlantic telephone cable |
1947 | American engineers John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain together with their group leader William Shockley invented the transistor. |
1948 | Hungarian-British physicist Dennis Gabor invented Holography |
1950s | Solid electrolyte tantalum capacitor was invented by Bell Laboratories |
1950 | French physicist Alfred Kastler invented the MASER |
1951 | First nuclear power plant in the US |
1952 | Japanese engineer Jun-ichi Nishizawa invented the avalanche photodiode[20] |
1953 | First fully transistorized computer in the U.S. |
1958 | American engineer Jack Kilby invented the integrated circuit (IC) |
1960 | American engineer Theodore Maiman develops the first laser |
1962 | Nick Holonyak invented the LED |
1963 | First home Videocassette recorder (VCR) |
1963 | Electronic calculator |
1966 | Fiber-optic communication by Kao and Hockham |
2008 | American scientist R. Stanley Williams invented the memristor which was proposed by Leon O. Chua in 1971 |
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Brief History of Electronics Timeline | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Date | Invention/Discovery | Inventor(s) | ||||||
1900 | Old quantum theory | Planck | ||||||
1905 | Theory of relativity | Einstein | ||||||
1918 | Atomic transmutation | Rutherford | ||||||
1932 | Neutron | Chadwick | ||||||
1932 | Particle accelerator | Cockcroft and Walton | ||||||
1935 | Scanning electron microscope | Knoll | ||||||
1937 | Xerography | Carlson | ||||||
1937 | Oscilloscope | Von Ardenne, Dowling, and Bullen | ||||||
1950 | Modem | MIT and Bell Labs | ||||||
1950 | Karnaugh mapping technique (digital logic) | Karnaugh | ||||||
1952 | Digital voltmeter | Kay | ||||||
1954 | Solar battery | Chapin, Fuller, and Pearson | ||||||
1956 | Transatlantic telephone cable | UK and U.S. | ||||||
1957 | Sputnik I satellite | Soviet Union | ||||||
1957 | Nuclear Missile | Kurchatov / Soviet Union | ||||||
1957 | FORTRAN programming language | Watson Scientific | ||||||
1959 | First one-piece plain paper photocopier (Xerox 914) | Xerox | ||||||
1959 | Veroboard (Stripboard) | Terry Fitzpatrick | ||||||
1961 | Electronic clock | Vogel and Cie, patented by Alexander Bain, a Scottish clockmaker in 1840. | ||||||
1963 | First commercially successful audio compact cassette | Philips Corporation | ||||||
1964 | BASIC programming language | Kemeny and Kurtz | ||||||
1964 | Liquid-crystal display | George H. Heilmeier | ||||||
late 1960s | First digital fax machine | Dacom | ||||||
1969 | UNIX operating system | AT&T's Bell Labs | ||||||
1970 | First microprocessor (4004, 60,000 oper/s) | Intel | ||||||
1970 | First commercially available DRAM memory | IBM | ||||||
1971 | EPROM | N/A | ||||||
1971 | PASCAL programming language | Niklaus Wirth | ||||||
1971 | First microcomputer-on-a-chip | Intel | ||||||
1971 | Laser printer | Xerox | ||||||
1972 | 8008 processor (200 kHz, 16 kB) | Intel | ||||||
1972 | First programmable word processor | Automatic Electronic Systems | ||||||
1972 | 5¼-inch diskette | N/A | ||||||
1972 | First modern ATM (IBM 2984) | IBM | ||||||
1973 | Josephson junction | IBM | ||||||
1973 | Tunable continuous-wave laser | Bell Labs | ||||||
1973 | Ethernet | Robert Metcalfe at Xerox PARC | ||||||
1973 | Mobile phone | John F. Mitchell and Dr. Martin CooperofMotorola | ||||||
1974 | C (programming language) | Kernighan, Ritchie | ||||||
1974 | Programmable pocket calculator | Hewlett-Packard | ||||||
1975 | BASIC for personal computers | Allen | ||||||
1975 | First personal computer (Altair 8800) | Roberts | ||||||
1975 | Digital camera | Steven SassonofEastman Kodak | ||||||
1975 | Integrated optical circuits | Reinhart and Logan | ||||||
1975 | Omni-font optical character recognition system | Nuance Communications | ||||||
1975 | CCD flatbed scanner | Kurzweil Computer Products | ||||||
1975 | Text-to-speech synthesis | Kurzweil Computer Products | ||||||
1975 | First commercial reading machine for the blind (Kurzweil Reading Machine) | Kurzweil Computer Products | ||||||
1976 | Apple I computer | Wozniak, Jobs | ||||||
1977 | Launch of the "1977 trinity computers" expanding home computing, the Apple II, Commodore PET and the TRS-80 | Apple, Tandy Corporation, Commodore Business Machines | ||||||
1977 | First handheld electronic game (Auto Race) | Mattel | ||||||
1977 | LZ77 LZ77 algorithm created | Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv | ||||||
1978 | WordPerfect 1.0 | Satellite Software | ||||||
1980 | 3½-inch floppy (2-sided, 875 kB) | N/A | ||||||
1980 | VIC-20 | Commodore Business Machines | ||||||
1981 | IBM Personal Computer (8088 processor) | IBM | ||||||
1981 | MS-DOS 1.0 | Microsoft | ||||||
1981 | "Wet" solar cell | Bayer AG | ||||||
1982 | Commodore 64 | Commodore Business Machines | ||||||
1982 | First commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition | Kurzweil Applied Intelligence and Dragon Systems | ||||||
1983 | Satellite television | U.S. Satellite Communications, Inc. | ||||||
1983 | First built-in hard drive (IBM PC XT) | IBM | ||||||
1983 | C++ (programming language) | Stroustrup | ||||||
1984 | Macintosh computer (introduced) | Apple Computer | ||||||
1984 | CD-ROM player for personal computers | Philips | ||||||
1984 | First music synthesizer (Kurzweil K250) capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments | Kurzweil Music Systems | ||||||
1984 | Amiga computer (introduced) | Commodore | ||||||
1985 | 300,000 simultaneous telephone conversations over single optical fiber | AT&T, Bell Labs | ||||||
1987 | Warmer superconductivity | Karl Alex Mueller | ||||||
1987 | 80386 microprocessor (25 MHz) | Intel | ||||||
1989 | First commercial handheld GPS receiver (Magellan NAV 1000) | Magellan Navigation Inc. | ||||||
1989 | Silicon–germanium transistors | IBM fellow Bernie Meyerson | ||||||
1990 | 486 microprocessor (33 MHz) | Intel | ||||||
1993 | HAARP | U.S. | ||||||
1994 | Pentium processor, P5-based (60/90 MHz, 166.2 MIPS) | Intel | ||||||
1994 | Bluetooth | Ericsson | ||||||
1994 | First DVD player ever made | Tatung Company | ||||||
1996 | Alpha 21164 processor (550 MHz) | Digital Equipment | ||||||
1996 | P2SC processor (15 million transistors) | IBM |
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