Vintage Items
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Vintage-
Denoting something of high quality, especially something from the past or characteristic of the best period of a person's work.
What is the oldest electronic device?The first electronic device ever invented is the relay, a remote switch controlled by electricity that was invented in 1835 by Joseph Henry, an American scientist, although it is also claimed that the English inventor Edward Davy "certainly invented the electric relay"
in his electric telegraph c. 1835.
What was the first electronic built?ENIAC (/ˈɛniæk/; Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer, completed in 1945.
Who is the best electronic engineer in the world?Professor Frede Blaabjerg from Aalborg University in Denmark remains at the top of the ranking with an h-index of 176. In the 2023 edition of the top scientists in electronics and electrical engineering, MIT is the leading institution with a total of 28 scientists included in the ranking.
Famous Scientists and Inventors Who Shaped Electronics Engineering-
William Gilbert is the one coined the word electricus, while on his pioneering research on magnetism and static electricity. He is an English scientist, the most distinguished man of science in England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, who first to use the terms electric attraction, electric force and magnetic pole.Often referred to as the Master of Electricity, Benjamin Franklin has great contributions in the field of electricity, and perhaps the most remembered is his kite experiment on a thunderstorm that proved electricity and lightning are the same. He was also able to invent the lightning rod, discover the principle of conservation of change and identify positive and negative electrical charges.It was Luigi Galvani who pioneered the bioelectromagnetics, with incredible work in animal electricity. His experiment with dead frog’s leg muscles has been the benchmark of electrical patterns and signal from tissues as the nerves and muscles.Charles-Augustin de Coulomb had revolutionary work in the theory of attraction and repulsion between bodies of the same and opposite electrical charge. He was able to demonstrate an inverse square law for such forces and examine perfect conductors and dielectrics.
The inventions of Alessandro Volta have trademarked in electronics engineering, especially his battery that produced a reliable, steady current of electricity. This feat of Volta gave rise to electrochemistry, electromagnetism and the modern applications of electricity.Hans Christian Ørsted is attributed to be the originator of the connection between electricity and magnetism. His accidental discovery proved that an electric current produces a circular magnetic field as it flows through a wire, and the findings stirred much research into electrodynamics.A French mathematician and physicist, André-Marie Ampère is considered the first person to discover electromagnetism. Among his significant contributions is the Ampere’s circuital law, which relates the integrated magnetic field around a closed loop to the electric current passing through the loop.
Best known for his Ohm’s Law, which implies that the current flow through a conductor is directly proportional to the potential difference (voltage) and inversely proportional to the resistance, Georg Simon Ohm had passionate work on the conductivity of metals and the behavior of electrical circuits.
Michael Faraday demonstrated significant work in static electricity. He was the first to prove that the charge only resided on the exterior of a charged conductor, and exterior charge had no influence on anything enclosed within a conductor. He laid the foundation of the classical field theory, and developed the first dynamo in the form of a copper disk rotated between the poles of a permanent magnet.
Now familiar to engineers as the unit of energy, Joule, or James Prescott Joule discovered the law of conservation of energy and an experiment that further led to the discovery of the first law of thermodynamics. He was an English physicist with established work on the relationship between mechanical work and heat transfer.Every electronics engineer had encountered Gustav Robert Kichhoff, famous for the Kirchhoff’s Law. He was a German physicist that helped increase the understanding of electrical circuits, with laws of thermochemistry and thermal emission named after him apart from circuit theory. Kirchhoff was also responsible for using mathematics to understand the science of physics.
Solely responsible for the device called Wheatstone bridge, Sir Charles Wheatstone was an English physicist who experimented on the measurement of the speed of electricity in a conductor using a revolving mirror. The device he developed can accurately measure electrical resistance now used in most laboratories. He also patented an early telegraph.It was James Clerk Maxell who first told that electricity and magnetism are actually, at the deepest level, the same force – the electromagnetic force. He produced equations called the Maxwell’s Equations that is perhaps his greatest work.
A German physicist, Heinrich Rudolf Hertz was the first to satisfactorily demonstrate the existence of electromagnetic radiation waves. He did this by building an apparatus to produce and detect them. Later, his discovery was used in the flourish of radio waves as a medium in communication and broadcasting.
With a record of 1,093 patents which comprise key and minor innovations, Thomas Alva Edison is perhaps the most celebrated inventor in American history. Among his early inventions include the automatic telegraph repeater, when sent telegraph signals between unmanned stations but was never patented; the electric vote recorder, Edison’s first patent; and the quadruplex telegraph, which is a system capable of sending two messages simultaneously in each direction on the same wire. Later, he developed the carbon telephone, his own system for electricity distribution, and the wireless telegraph, among others.
This underrated genius named Nikola Tesla invented the alternating-current generator, the transformer, and he high voltage coil of the picture tube. He also developed an oscillator that generated half a million volts and a wireless world broadcasting tower. Tesla also worked on rotary engines, microwaves, radars and loudspeakers. With all this significant engineering work, he never got the glory he deserved during his time because he was thought to be a madman.
Guglielmo Marconi is an Italian inventor and engineer who developed the first successful long-distance wireless telegraph. He broadcasted the first transatlantic radio signal, which attained him partly the Nobel Prize in Physics.
The inventor of the oscillation diode valve or vacuum tube, John Ambrose Fleming is the one who set the benchmark for modern electronics, which why he is regarded as the father of modern electronics. He enabled the first wireless sets with a reasonable performance to be manufactured.
It was Lee De Forest who invented the Audion vacuum tube, which made live radio broadcasting possible before the invention of the transistor. It is now the key component in all radio, telephone, radar, television and computer systems. He had more than 300 patents.A German physicist who laid work in solid-state physics and electronics, Walter Schottky discovered an irregularity in the emission of thermions in a vacuum tube, now known as the Schottky effect. He also developed the screen-grid tube and the tetrode.
Best credited for the invention of the frequency-modulated radio, Edwin Howard Armstrong also has two other key innovations, which are regeneration and superheterodyning.
Harold Stephen Black is an American electrical engineer who laid the negative-feedback principle now widely applied in electronics. He worked with the Western Electric Company and Bell Telephone Laboratories. He devised the negative-feedback amplifier while trying to find a way to reduce amplifier distortion.
Philo Taylor Fransworth is the man who invented the electronic television, at only age 21. He did this by smoking a glass slide with carbon and scratched a single line on it, and placed it on a carbon arc projector and shone onto the photocathode of the first camera tube.
Nobel Prize for Physics winner William B. Shockley was responsible for the development of the transistor, which is one of the greatest achievements in technological history. He worked on semiconductor to control and amplify electronic signals, with John Bardeen and Walter Brattain. They developed the point-contact transistor, and later on, the junction transistor.
Walter H. Brattain shared the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1956 with William Shockley and John Bardeen for the investigation of the properties of semiconductors and for the development of the transistor.
One of the Nobel Prize for Physics trio for their invention of the transistor, John Bardeen won the same award in 1972 for the theory of superconductivity. He focused on the electrical conduction in semiconductors and metals, and surface properties of semiconductors.
Read more at: https://gineersnow.com/engineering/electronics/famous-scientists-inventors-shaped-electronics-engineering
Read more at: https://gineersnow.com/engineering/electronics/famous-scientists-inventors-shaped-electronics-engineering
Women and Electrical and Electronics ManufacturingWhile it is true that men made many of the key inventions in electrical devices and electronics, women played a role that was equally important—it was women more than men who assembled these technologies in factories. The prominence of women in electrical and electronics manufacturing was because of reasons, which, from today’s perspective, appear to be unjust. Because of sex discrimination, women could be hired as factory workers for lower wages than men. Hiring women instead of men for assembly jobs meant more profits for the company. The irony, however, is that they were often as well-educated and as highly skilled as their male counterparts.From the consumer’s perspective, this was not exploitation but progress. Partly because their wages were so low, women made it possible for corporations to mass produce electrical and electronics devices and sell them at low cost. This enabled ordinary consumers to bring radios, televisions, appliances, and other technologies into their homes and lives. If it had not been possible to manufacture these items in vast quantities at ever-lower prices, it is unlikely that we would have them today. So there was both good and bad in this system.It is also important to see things from the perspective of the times. In the early 20th century, many women workers saw employment in the electrical industries as highly desirable. To them, it was much better than most of the other jobs open to women, such as sewing in “sweatshop” apparel factories or working in other industries (which often involved dirtier or more strenuous work). Women in the electrical and electronics industries were also well represented by labor unions, which helped make working conditions better. The issue of who benefited from the advent of new technology is always complex, and always depends on one’s perspective.Women had entered the electrical manufacturing industries at the beginning on the 20th century, making light bulbs and electric motors. World War I accelerated the process of mechanization in the electrical industry, where machines and unskilled laborers were substituted for skilled craftwork. Mechanization made it attractive to employers to hire the lowest-wage workers they could find, and in the United States that usually meant women (minorities such as African-Americans might have been hired, but the extreme discrimination at the time meant that employers usually would not hire them at all). There were factory jobs reserved for men, but during World Wars I and II, when men were called to battle, women temporarily held these jobs.A survey of women in electrical manufacturing during World War I (1914-1918) showed that women were doing tasks such as stamping mica insulators for electric motors, winding coils for motors and transformers, and assembling and connecting motors. According to one observer, “little skill was required for much of the work, but the ability to follow written specifications was essential.” Literacy, of course is a skill, although like many skills that women possessed, it was rarely appreciated at the time. Though they were paid little, women were typically well-educated and technically proficient, making them ideal for these jobs.The coming of radio continued the trend of greater numbers of women workers. In 1920, although radio was still a new technology, women were already employed making electron (vacuum) tubes and testing radio units. By the late 1920s, there were 6,000 women but only 400 men employed by U.S. factories making tubes, radio receivers, speakers, capacitors, and transmitters. World War II (1939-1945) pushed even more women into factories, especially in the rapidly expanding electronics industries. From a total of about 100,000 women who were employed in electrical industries in the late 1930s, the figure during World War II grew to 397,000. By 1945, when the war ended, fully 1/2 of all workers in electron tube manufacturing were women. The trend continued after the war as well. A survey taken in 1953, just about five years after television set production resumed after World War II, showed that nearly all workers on television assembly lines were women. These women sat on each side of a 300-foot long table using hand tools to do repetitive tasks such as wiring, soldering, lacing the wiring in TV sets, inserting parts in sequence, inserting tubes, and final testing.The electronics industry was the largest employer of women in the United States by 1960. In the United States, the assembly of consumer electronics devices declined after 1960, and many of these jobs were transferred to Latin America and Asia, where labor was even less expensive. Today, many women around the world are employed assembling televisions, cellular telephones, computers, and other electrical devices.
For Further ReadingSprague Electric: An Electronic Giant's Rise, Fall, and Life after Death -- a history of a capacitor manufacturing company, with some detail on women's roles in manufacturing capacitors, condensers and other components.
For Further ReadingSprague Electric: An Electronic Giant's Rise, Fall, and Life after Death -- a history of a capacitor manufacturing company, with some detail on women's roles in manufacturing capacitors, condensers and other components.