Go Big or Go Home:
The First Transatlantic Telegraph Cable and the Birth of Electrical Engineering
Professor Thomas H. Lee

[Professor Thomas H. Lee]

Electrical engineers are the children of a failure so traumatic that we don't even talk about it. American paper magnate Cyrus West Field drove the Victorian era's equivalent of a moon-shot: Spanning the Atlantic with a telegraph cable. Amplifiers would not exist for another half-century, so success would require mastery of a number of complex technical disciplines. Regrettably, the project's technical head was a medical doctor.

A British board of inquiry convened to assess the resulting failures noted that the electrical arts lacked even a basic vocabulary to describe the failure. William Thomson was eventually named the new head of the project, and final success followed in 1866. The volt, ohm and ampere were formally defined shortly thereafter and the profession of electrical engineering was born. Thomson -- arguably the first professional electrical engineer -- became Lord Kelvin, and EEs have been busy making mischief ever since.

Speaker Bio

Tom Lee paid his way through MIT by working at places like Frank Kent's TV and Radio Service and Hughes Aircraft. His 1989 doctoral thesis at MIT described the world's first CMOS radio. He has been at Stanford University since 1994, helped design PLLs for several microprocessors from DEC and AMD, and has founded or co-founded several companies.

He is an IEEE and Packard Foundation Fellow, and is also the 2011 recipient of the Ho-Am Prize in Engineering (informally known as "The Korean Nobel"). He is a past Director of DARPA's Microsystems Technology Office, and owns between 100 and 200 oscilloscopes, thousands of vacuum tubes and kilograms of obsolete semiconductors. No one, including himself, quite knows why.