| 1834 |
Orange Alfonso Smalley, a young blacksmith and mechanic living with his parents, and another blacksmith, Thomas Davenport, develop the electric motor. |
| 1837 |
Samuel Morse develops the Morse code, which allows a single-wire electrical communication system. |
| 1876 |
Alexander Graham Bell patents the telephone. |
| 1879 |
Thomas Alva Edison invents the light bulb with backing of investors. This group leads to the General Electric Company. |
| 1887-88 |
Nikola Tesla invents the AC induction motor and other alternating current devices. |
| 1888 |
George Westinghouse, having formed the Westinghouse Electric Company four years earlier, buys Tesla’s patents for polyphase power generation. |
| 1883 |
Cornell University establishes the first Department of Electrical Engineering |
| 1895 |
Guglielmo Marconi develops a wireless telegraph system. In 1901, he demonstrates transoceanic wireless communication between Great Britain and the United States. |
| 1897 |
Karl Braun invents the cathode ray tube (CRT), which leads to the oscilloscope. |
| 1904 |
J.A. Fleming initiates electronics by developing what he calls a “valve,” which is an electronic diode. |
| 1906 |
Lee DeForest develops the audion, a vacuum tube that can provide gain. However, he does not understand how it works. |
| 1912 |
Edwin Armstrong develops the regenerative receiver that uses the audion tube. After World War I (1918), he develops heterodyning for radio. |
| 1918 |
Armstrong invents heterodyning for radio, an approach to demodulation still used today. |
| 1921 |
First licensed, commercial radio stations start broadcasting. |
| 1923, 1927 |
Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin develop the vidicon tube, a critical part of a television camera |
| 1933 |
Armstrong develops frequency modulation (FM). |
| 1935 |
Robert Watson-Watt conceives of radar (radio detection and ranging). |
| 1942-43 |
High-frequency radar developed at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory |
| 1946 |
Commercial television begins. |
| 1946 |
ENIAC, the first electronic computer, is demonstrated at the University of Pennsylvania |
| 1947 |
Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain demonstrate the transistor at Bell Labs |
| 1953 |
IBM develops the magnetic disk drive. |
| 1958 |
Arthur L. Schawlow and Charles Townes publish a paper describing what would become called the laser. |
| 1958, 1959 |
Jack Kilby (Texas Instruments) and Robert Noyce (Fairchild Semiconductor) develop the integrated circuit. |
| 1967 |
Larry Roberts and Bob Taylor of the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) proposes the construction of a national computer network. |
| 1969 |
MCI granted a license to carry telephone signals between St. Louis and Chicago. This act opens the door for the breakup of AT&T’s monopoly. |
| 1977 |
The Federal Communications Commission grants licenses for experimenting with cellular telephony |
| 1979 |
Carver Mead and Lynn Conway publish Introduction to VLSI Systems, where they propose that CAD be used in the design of computer chips. |
| 1983 |
Compact disc (CD) technology developed by Philips and Sony. |
| 1992 |
Tim Berners-Lee interconnects several sites to form the World Wide Web. |
| 1993 |
Marc Andreessen develops Mosaic, the first web browser with a graphical user interface. He and James Clark soon thereafter found Netscape. |
| 1995 |
The DVD format is defined. |
