Some of these names are on the front of your electricity bill; others only survive in the units engineers use every day.
1Nikola TeslaSerbian-American engineer whose polyphase alternating-current system became the basis of the modern power grid.1000pts
2Guglielmo MarconiItalian engineer who built the first commercial wireless telegraph and sent a signal across the Atlantic in 1901.551pts
3Michael FaradayEnglish experimenter who discovered electromagnetic induction, the principle behind every generator and transformer.509pts
4Charles Proteus SteinmetzGeneral Electric's chief engineer, who made AC circuits calculable with complex-number analysis.461pts
5Claude ShannonAmerican engineer whose 1948 information theory underpins every digital transmission.407pts
6James Clerk MaxwellScottish physicist whose equations unified electricity, magnetism and light into one theory.344pts
7Oliver HeavisideSelf-taught English engineer who reduced Maxwell's twenty equations to the four still taught today.344pts
8Robert NoyceCo-inventor of the silicon integrated circuit and co-founder of Intel.344pts
9Alexander Graham BellScottish-born inventor of the telephone and founder of the company that became AT&T.271pts
10Heinrich HertzGerman physicist who proved radio waves exist; the unit of frequency carries his name.271pts
11George WestinghouseAmerican engineer and industrialist who bankrolled AC power and won the contract to light the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.271pts
12Werner von SiemensGerman engineer who developed the self-excited dynamo and founded the electrical firm that still bears his name.271pts
13William ShockleyCo-inventor of the transistor at Bell Labs and the man who brought silicon to the valley named after it.271pts
14Thomas EdisonAmerican inventor of the first practical incandescent lighting system and the first commercial power station, Pearl Street, in 1882.185pts
15Jack KilbyTexas Instruments engineer who built the first integrated circuit in 1958 and won the Nobel Prize for it.185pts
16Hedy LamarrFilm star and inventor who co-patented a frequency-hopping system that anticipated spread-spectrum radio.185pts
17John BardeenElectrical engineering graduate who co-invented the transistor at Bell Labs and remains the only person to win the Nobel Prize in Physics twice.
18Frank J. SpragueEdison's former assistant who built the first large electric street railway in Richmond in 1888 and invented multiple-unit train control.
19Elihu ThomsonProlific inventor of electric welding and arc lighting whose Thomson-Houston company merged with Edison's in 1892 to form General Electric.
20Sebastian Ziani de FerrantiBritish engineer who designed Deptford Power Station in 1889, the first to send high-voltage alternating current across a city.
21Zénobe GrammeBelgian engineer whose 1871 Gramme dynamo was the first generator able to supply commercial quantities of direct current.
22Galileo FerrarisItalian engineer who independently discovered the rotating magnetic field in 1885, the principle behind every induction motor.
23William Stanley Jr.Westinghouse engineer who built the first practical transformer and powered the streets of Great Barrington with alternating current in 1886.
24Samuel MorseCo-developer of the electric telegraph and the Morse code, which sent the first long-distance message from Washington to Baltimore in 1844.
25Charles WheatstoneEnglish inventor of the Wheatstone bridge and co-inventor of the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph, the first in commercial service.
26Edwin Howard ArmstrongAmerican engineer who invented the regenerative circuit, the superheterodyne receiver and wideband FM radio.
27Reginald FessendenCanadian engineer who pioneered amplitude modulation and made the first radio broadcast of voice and music on Christmas Eve 1906.
28Lee de ForestInventor of the Audion triode in 1906, the first electronic amplifier and the starting point of the electronics age.
29John Ambrose FlemingEnglish engineer who invented the thermionic valve in 1904 and designed the transmitter for Marconi's first transatlantic signal.
30Vladimir ZworykinRussian-American engineer at RCA who developed the iconoscope camera tube and the kinescope, the building blocks of electronic television.
31Philo FarnsworthUtah farm boy who sketched electronic television as a teenager and transmitted the first all-electronic image in 1927.
32Frederick TermanStanford dean of engineering who taught Hewlett and Packard and is often called the father of Silicon Valley.
33Vannevar BushMIT electrical engineer who built the differential analyzer and led American wartime science, including the Manhattan Project's early stages.
34Federico FagginItalian engineer who led the design of the Intel 4004, the first commercial microprocessor, in 1971, and created silicon-gate technology.
35Gordon MooreIntel co-founder whose 1965 observation that transistor counts double regularly became Moore's law, the pace-setter of the chip industry.
36Mohamed AtallaEgyptian-American engineer who developed surface passivation and, with Dawon Kahng, built the first MOSFET at Bell Labs in 1959.
37Ernst AlexandersonSwedish-American engineer at General Electric whose high-frequency alternator powered long-range radio and who later demonstrated home television.
38Karl Ferdinand BraunGerman physicist who invented the cathode-ray tube and shared the 1909 Nobel Prize with Marconi for improving wireless telegraphy.
39Joseph HenryAmerican scientist who built powerful electromagnets, discovered self-inductance and invented the relay that made long telegraph lines work.
Comments 1
Faraday found induction and Maxwell wrote the equations, which puts the two current-war men further down than expected: https://youpick.best/articles/tesla-vs-edison-ranked
YP
ypb-teamSep 2
