# Who is the greatest electrical engineer of all time?

> Some of these names are on the front of your electricity bill; others only survive in the units engineers use every day.

*By YPB Team · Published September 1, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-greatest-electrical-engineer-of-all-time*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **Nikola Tesla** — score 1000/1000
   Serbian-American engineer whose polyphase alternating-current system became the basis of the modern power grid.
2. **Guglielmo Marconi** — score 551/1000
   Italian engineer who built the first commercial wireless telegraph and sent a signal across the Atlantic in 1901.
3. **Michael Faraday** — score 509/1000
   English experimenter who discovered electromagnetic induction, the principle behind every generator and transformer.
4. **Charles Proteus Steinmetz** — score 461/1000
   General Electric's chief engineer, who made AC circuits calculable with complex-number analysis.
5. **Claude Shannon** — score 407/1000
   American engineer whose 1948 information theory underpins every digital transmission.
6. **James Clerk Maxwell** — score 344/1000
   Scottish physicist whose equations unified electricity, magnetism and light into one theory.
7. **Oliver Heaviside** — score 344/1000
   Self-taught English engineer who reduced Maxwell's twenty equations to the four still taught today.
8. **Robert Noyce** — score 344/1000
   Co-inventor of the silicon integrated circuit and co-founder of Intel.
9. **Alexander Graham Bell** — score 271/1000
   Scottish-born inventor of the telephone and founder of the company that became AT&T.
10. **Heinrich Hertz** — score 271/1000
   German physicist who proved radio waves exist; the unit of frequency carries his name.
11. **George Westinghouse** — score 271/1000
   American engineer and industrialist who bankrolled AC power and won the contract to light the 1893 Chicago World's Fair.
12. **Werner von Siemens** — score 271/1000
   German engineer who developed the self-excited dynamo and founded the electrical firm that still bears his name.
13. **William Shockley** — score 271/1000
   Co-inventor of the transistor at Bell Labs and the man who brought silicon to the valley named after it.
14. **Thomas Edison** — score 185/1000
   American inventor of the first practical incandescent lighting system and the first commercial power station, Pearl Street, in 1882.
15. **Jack Kilby** — score 185/1000
   Texas Instruments engineer who built the first integrated circuit in 1958 and won the Nobel Prize for it.
16. **Hedy Lamarr** — score 185/1000
   Film star and inventor who co-patented a frequency-hopping system that anticipated spread-spectrum radio.

Tags: historical-figures, science, inventors