List of electrical engineers

Summary

This is a list of electrical engineers (by no means exhaustive), people who have made notable contributions to electrical engineering or computer engineering.

Name Contribution(s)
A
Norman Abramson ALOHAnet network communication
Robert Campbell Aitken Testing and diagnosis of integrated circuits
Luigi Amerio Laplace transforms
Edwin Armstrong Radio, Regenerative circuit, superheterodyne receiver, frequency modulation (FM)
Maria Artini First female university graduate in electrical engineering in Italy (1918)
Rodney Adkins First African American to serve as a senior vice president at IBM, worked on IBM ThinkPad.
Hertha Marks Ayrton Electric arc lighting, Hughes Medal of the Royal Society
William Edward Ayrton Measuring instruments, electric railways, searchlight
B
John Bardeen Two Nobel prizes: transistor, superconductivity
Emile Baudot Telegraphy communications
Andy Bechtolsheim Co-founder of Sun Microsystems
Arnold Orville Beckman pH meter, Beckman Instruments, Silicon Valley pioneer
Alexander Graham Bell Bell Telephone Company
Alfred Rosling Bennett Pioneer of electric lighting and telephones
Harold Stephen Black Negative feedback amplifier
Ottó Bláthy Pioneering electrical engineer
André Blondel Oscillography, electrical machine theory
Alan Blumlein Inventions in telecommunications, sound recording, stereo, television, radar
Hendrik Wade Bode Control theory, Bode plot
Mikhail Botvinnik Computer chess, expert system AI
Paul Boucherot Reactive power
Karlheinz Brandenburg Audio compression scheme MP3
Charles Tilston Bright Transatlantic telegraph cable
Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown Co-founder of Brown, Boveri & Cie
William C. Brown Crossed-field amplifier, microwave power transmission
Walter Bruch Television pioneer, inventor of the PAL colour television system
Charles Brush Efficient dynamo, electric lighting, a founder of General Electric, wind power
James Buie Inventor of TTL Logic
Charles Frederick Burgess Battery technology development, pioneer of electrochemical engineering
C
Alan Archibald Campbell-Swinton Theory of television
Marvin Camras Magnetic recording
John Renshaw Carson Single-sideband modulation
James Kilton Clapp Clapp oscillator, General Radio Corporation
Edith Clarke First American female professor of EE, author of Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems
Lynn Conway Very large scale integrated circuit design, Mead and Conway revolution
William Coolidge X-ray technology
William Corin Snowy Mountains Scheme
Seymour Cray Supercomputer architect
Rookes Evelyn Bell Crompton Electric lighting, FRS, Crompton & Company, Major in the U.K. Army
D
Sidney Darlington Darlington transistor
Lee de Forest Audion vacuum tube
Jack Dennis Time sharing, Multics
Robert Dennard Dynamic random-access memory
Marcel Deprez HVDC power transmission pioneer
Bern Dibner Founder Burndy Co., electrical connectors, historian of the Transatlantic telegraph cable
Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky Inventor of three-phase motor
Ray Dolby Dolby sound
William Duddell Oscillography, the singing arc lamp
Allen DuMont Television manufacturing pioneer
E
John Presper Eckert Computer pioneer
Thomas Edison Prolific inventor: phonograph, first practical light bulb, telegraph improvements
Cyril Frank Elwell Continuous Wave radio transmission, AM radio, founder of Federal Telegraph Company
Douglas Engelbart Computer mouse, hypertext
Gertrude Lilian Entwisle First woman student member of Institution of Electrical Engineers first female engineer at British Westinghouse.
Justus Entz Electric transmission, electric vehicles, worked with Edison
Agner Krarup Erlang Communications and Queueing
Lloyd Espenschied Developments in radio communications and coaxial cable technology.
F
Federico Faggin Intel microprocessor, Zilog z80
Michael Faraday Discovered electromagnetic induction and Faraday shield
Moses Farmer Electric railway
Philo Farnsworth American television pioneer
Galileo Ferraris Rotating magnetic field
Sebastian Ziani de Ferranti Ferranti Corporation
Reginald Fessenden 'Father' of radio broadcasting
Donald Fink Radio navigation LORAN, television standards, author and editor
Gerhard Fischer Handheld metal detector
John Ambrose Fleming Inventor of the thermionic valve (vacuum tube)
Tommy Flowers Designer of the first programmable digital electronic computer
Jay Forrester American computer pioneer
Charles Legeyt Fortescue Symmetrical components for three-phase power system analysis
Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier Physicist; Fourier transform / Fourier series
Limor Fried Founder of Adafruit Industries, open source hardware advocate
Leonard Fuller Radio pioneer, carrier current on power systems
G
Dennis Gabor Hungarian inventor of holography, Nobel Laureate
Claire Gmachl Advanced development of quantum cascade lasers
Bernhard Goldenberg Responsible for the rapid expansion of electrification in the Rhineland and Ruhr area
James Edward Henry Gordon (J.E.H. Gordon) Electric lighting and power
Zénobe Gramme Dynamo
Elisha Gray Telephone pioneer
Richard Grimsdale Transistorized computers
H
Susan Hackwood Co-inventor of electro-wetting
Erna Hamburger Swiss electrical engineer working in radio-wave research. First female STEM professor in Switzerland.
Edward E. Hammer Spiral compact fluorescent lamp
Naomi Halas Nanophotonics
Roger F. Harrington Computational electromagnetics, method of moments (MoM)
Ralph Hartley Electronics
Caroline Haslett Founder of The Woman Engineer
Oliver Heaviside Re-formulated Maxwell's equations (vector calculus)
Oskar Heil Field-effect transistor, loudspeaker
Heinrich Rudolf Hertz Hertzian waves
Peter Cooper Hewitt Mercury vapor lamp, mercury arc rectifier
William Hewlett Hewlett-Packard
Hugo Hirst Co-founder of General Electric Company
Godfrey Hounsfield Inventor of the world's first computed tomography (CT) scanner, shared 1979 Nobel prize
Edwin J. Houston Arc lighting, co-founder of what would become General Electric, president of AIEE
John Hopkinson Inventor of three-phase electrical system
Grace Hopper Computer programmer (first compiler)
Lawrence A. Hyland Radar pioneer, leader of Hughes Aircraft
Kees Schouhamer Immink Pioneer optical recording, CD, DVD, Blu-ray Disc
Fleeming Jenkin Submarine telegraph cables
Kristina Johnson Polarization-control techniques
Paul Horowitz SETI, co-author of The Art of Electronics
Mina Hsiang Third Administrator of the United States Digital Service, Executive Office of the President of the United States
I
Samuel Insull Central station generation, electrical utilities, Edison pioneer
J
Bill Joy Unix - Sun Microsystems
K
Rudolf Kálmán Inventor of the Kalman filter
Kálmán Kandó Pioneer of high voltage railway electrification systems
Nathaniel S. Keith Founding secretary of AIEE; electric power
Arthur E. Kennelly Complex numbers in AC circuit theory
Charles Kettering Automobile electrical innovations, Delco founder
Jack Kilby Nobel prize: integrated circuit
Max Knoll Electron microscope
Otto A. Knopp Innovator of the standard testing transformer and the compensation winding.
John D. Kraus Radio telescope, antennas
Herbert Kroemer Heterostructures and semiconductor physics
L
Eric Laithwaite Linear induction motor
Uno Lamm Swedish, HVDC and mercury-arc valves
Ayyalasomayajula Lalitha India’s first female electrical engineer
Benjamin G. Lamme Niagara Falls power engineering
Bertha Lamme Westinghouse's first female engineer, first American woman to graduate in a main discipline of engineering other than civil engineering
Georges Leclanché Primary battery
Morris E. Leeds Leeds & Northrup measurement and control devices
Alexander Lodygin Russian, incandescent lighting, motors
M
Östen Mäkitalo 'Father' of cellular phone
Guglielmo Marconi Practical radio
Orlando R. Marsh Electrical sound recording
Erwin Otto Marx Marx generator high voltage DC
Mabel Lucy Matthews British electrical and production engineer, instigator of idea for the Electrical Association for Women
John Mauchly ENIAC designer
Florence Violet McKenzie Australia's first female EE, educator, OBE
Charles Hesterman Merz NESCO electric power grid, England
William Henry Merrill Founder of Underwriters Laboratories
Robert Metcalfe Ethernet, 3Com
Antonio Meucci Telephone pioneer
John L. Moll Solid-state physics, the Ebers-Moll transistor model
Robert Moog Electronic music pioneer, invented Moog synthesizer
Daniel McFarlan Moore Electrical discharge lighting
N
Shuji Nakamura Blue gallium-nitride light-emitting diode
Edward Lawry Norton Norton's theorem
Robert Noyce Co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel
Nikhilesh Chandrashekar Chandashekar's phenomenon
O
Bernard M. (Barney) Oliver Hewlett-Packard, founder HP Labs
Kenneth Olsen Magnetic-core memory; Digital Equipment Corporation
Stanford R. Ovshinsky Semiconductors
P
David Packard Hewlett-Packard
Robert H. Park Park's transformation
Margaret Partridge Electrical engineer, contractor and founder member of the Women's Engineering Society (WES) and the Electrical Association for Women (EAW). Helped change the International Labour Organisation convention on night work for women in 1934
R. Fabian Pease Professor at Stanford University
Donald Pederson 'Father' of SPICE
Dinh Thuy Phan Huy Wireless 5G research in Europe
G. W. Pierce Oscillator, crystal control
William Henry Preece Telegraphy, nemesis of Heaviside
Franklin Leonard Pope Telegraphy, electric lighting, Edison influence
Valdemar Poulsen Magnetic recording
Michael I. Pupin Long-distance telephone communication; "Pupin coil"
Simon Ramo Physicist, microwaves, missiles, founder of TRW and Bunker Ramo Corporation
Richard H. Ranger Wireless fax, radar, magnetic tape recording
Alec Reeves Inventor of pulse code modulation
Johann Philipp Reis Inventor of the Reis telephone
Hyman G. Rickover 'Father' of the nuclear Navy
Edward S. Rogers, Sr. Inventor of the first successful AC radio tube
Francis Ronalds Built first working electric telegraph
Arye Rosen Semiconductor devices and circuits for use in microwave systems and for microwave applications to medicine
Harold Rosen Syncom communication satellite
H. J. Round Radio pioneer and assistant to Guglielmo Marconi
Reinhold Rudenberg Electron microscope
S
Carl Louis Schwendler Electric lighting and telegraph
Thomas Johann Seebeck Thermoelectric effect
Oliver B. Shallenberger AC electricity meters
Claude Shannon 'Father' of communication theory
Ernst Werner von Siemens Inventor, industrialist, Siemens & Halske, Siemens (unit)
Carl Wilhelm Siemens Telegraphy, motors and generators, electric pyrometer
Alexander Siemens Electric lighting, power, Society of Telegraph Engineers (predecessor to IEE)
Phillip Hagar Smith Smith chart
Percy Spencer Microwave oven
Frank J. Sprague 'Father' of electric traction
Chauncey Starr Founder of Electric Power Research Institute
J. J. Stiffler Key contributions in communications (especially coding theory) and fault-tolerant computing
Charles Proteus Steinmetz Alternating current theories, first use of j operator
T
Sarkes Tarzian Radio inventor, broadcasting, radio manufacturer
Albert H. Taylor First demonstration of radar
Bernard D. H. Tellegen Inventor of the pentode, formulated Tellegen's theorem
Nikola Tesla Revolving magnetic field induction motor, Tesla coil, polyphase transmission systems, transformer
Silvanus P. Thompson Educator, author, electrical machinery, X-ray technology, radio
Elihu Thomson Entrepreneur, co-founder of what would become General Electric
William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) Telegraphic cables
René Thury High-voltage direct current power transmission, electric traction
Kálmán Tihanyi Television pioneer
Philip Torchio Edison Electric Company
V
Charles Joseph Van Depoele Electric railway pioneer
C. F. Varley Submarine cable, Varley bridge
Milan Vidmar Power transformers and high-voltage transmission
Andrew Viterbi Communications
Alessandro Volta Inventor of electrical battery and pioneer of electrical science
W
Trevor Wadley Innovations in radio and microwave technology
Harry Ward Leonard Inventor of the Ward Leonard control system.
Robert Watson-Watt First practical radar
George Westinghouse AC power industrialist
Harold Alden Wheeler Automatic volume control, radar
Uncas A. Whitaker Founder of AMP Inc. and philanthropist
Bob Widlar Integrated circuits
Niklaus Wirth Computer programming languages
Steve Wozniak Personal computers, Apple Computer
Y
Pavel Yablochkov Electric arc lighting
Hidetsugu Yagi Yagi-Uda antenna
Kane S. Yee Finite-difference time-domain method
Z
Otto Julius Zobel Filters
Konrad Zuse Computers

See also edit