Electrical Science & Signal Theory Timeline

1600 William Gilbert publishes De Magnete. Perhaps the first book that applied the scientific method of combining model, prediction, and observation into a systematic study of a phenomenon. He apparently first used the word “electric”.
1752 Benjamin Franklin discovers that lightning and electricity are the same.
1769 Franklin publishes Experiments and Observations on Electricity, made at Philadelphia in America.
1780 Luigi Galvani shows that muscle reacts to electricity and develops a battery from metals and “vital fluids.”
1800 Alessandro Volta develops the electric pile, a forerunner of the battery.
1805 Carl Frederich Gauss discovers the fast Fourier transform, but does not publish it. Rediscovered in 1965 by James Cooley and John Tukey.
1807 Jean Baptiste Fourier unsuccessfully defends his thesis on a theory of heat conduction, which contains the infinite “Fourier” series.
1819 Hans Oersted, a Danish physcist, discovers a relationship between electricity and magnetism by noting that current flow affects compass needles.
1820 André-Marie Ampère develops a mathematical theory inspired by Oersted’s observations. In his publication several years later, Ampère uses the symbol i for “intensité de current”, making j the symbol for &root;-1 for electrical engineers.
1821- Michael Faraday extends Oersted’s observations, and proves experimentally many aspects of electromagnetism.
1827 Georg Ohm publishes Die galvanische Kette, mathematisch bearbeitet, a mathematical treatise on electricity.
1829-31 Joseph Henry, unaware of Faraday’s work, develops electromagnets and discovers self-inductance.
1853 Hermann von Helmholtz, while working on “animal electricity,” mathematically shows what is now known as Thévenin’s Theorem.
1862-73 James Clerk Maxwell develops a comprehensive theory of electromagetism, culminating in Electricity and Magnetism, published in 1873.
1883 Léon Charles Thévenin publishes a paper describing his equivalent circuit.
1880-87 Oliver Heaviside develops the operational calculus, the mathematical ingredient of impedances. Previously, he had streamlined Maxwell’s equations into the form we know them today.
1888 Heinrich Hertz experimentally verifies that electromagnetic fields propagate.
1896 Carl Steinmetz introduces complex numbers into calculations for AC circuits.
1913 Neils Bohr describes the physics of the hydrogen atom, ushering in quantum physics
1919 Lord Adrian shows, using a crude oscilloscope and electronic amplifiers, that neurons produce voltages pulses and that these cause muscle contractions.
1922 Sir Ronald Fisher develops the theory of maximum likelihood estimation.
1927 Harold Black (Bell Labs) develops the concept of negative feedback for electronic amplifier design. The idea led to feedback control systems.
1928 Harold Nyquist proves the Sampling Theorem.
1933 Jerzy Neyman and Egon Pearson rigorously prove the optimality of the likelihood ratio test, which provides the foundation for radar and digital communication.
1947 William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrate the transistor at Bell Labs.
1948 Claude Shannon publishes “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”
1948 Norbert Wiener publishes Cybernetics, which describes modeling humans as communication and control systems.
1949 Norbert Wiener publishes Extrapolation, Interpolation, and Smoothing of Stationary Time Series, which describes the Wiener filter, the optimal noise-reduction linear filter.
1958 Arthur L. Schawlow and Charles Townes publish a paper describing what would become called the laser.
1960 Rudy Kalman derives the optimal filtering equations for dynamic systems using state variables.
1964 Paul Baran (Rand Corpration) develops the concept of a computer network that uses packet switching to route information.
1965 James Cooley and John Tukey rediscover the FFT algorithm, ushering in digital signal processing.
1976 Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie develop public key encryption. Soon thereafter, Ronald Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Len Adleman elaborate and commercialize the approach to create the RSA encryption standard.