List of IEEE milestones

This list of IEEE Milestones describes the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) milestones, representing key historical achievements in electrical and electronic engineering.[1]

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

Prior to 1800

• 1751 – Book Experiments and Observations on Electricity by Benjamin Franklin
• 1757–1775 – Benjamin Franklin's Work in London
• 1799 – Alessandro Volta's Electrical Battery Invention

1800–1850

• 1836 – Nicholas Callan's Pioneering Contributions to Electrical Science and Technology
• 1828–1837 – Pavel Schilling's Pioneering Contribution to Practical Telegraphy
• 1838 – Demonstration of Practical Telegraphy

1850–1870

• 1852 – Electric Fire Alarm System
• 1861–1870 – Maxwell's Equations
• 1861 – Transcontinental Telegraph
• 1866 – Landing of the Transatlantic Cable
• 1866 – County Kerry Transatlantic Cable Stations

1870–1890

• 1876 – First Intelligible Voice Transmission over Electric Wire
• 1876 – First Distant Speech Transmission in Canada
• 1876 – Thomas Alva Edison Historic Site at Menlo Park
• 1882 – Vulcan Street Plant
• 1882 – Pearl Street Station
• 1882 – First Central Station in South Carolina
• 1884 – First AIEE Technical Meeting
• 1886 – Alternating Current Electrification (demonstrated by William Stanley, Jr.)
• 1886 – First Generation and Experimental Proof of Electromagnetic Waves
• 1887 – Thomas A. Edison West Orange Laboratories and Factories
• 1887 – Weston Meters, first portable current and voltage meters
• 1888 – Richmond Union Passenger Railway
• 1889 – Power System of Boston's Rapid Transit

1890–1900

• 1890 – Discovery of Radioconduction with a Coherer by Édouard Branly
• 1890 – Keage Power Station, Japan's First Commercial Hydroelectric Plant
• 1891 – Ames Hydroelectric Generating Plant
• 1893 – Birth and Growth of Battery Industries in Japan
• 1893 – Mill Creek No. 1 Hydroelectric Plant
• 1894 – Millimeter-wave Communication Experiments by Jagadish Chandra Bose
• 1895 – Popov's Contribution to the Development of Wireless Communication
• 1895 – Adams Hydroelectric Generating Plant
• 1895 – Krka-Šibenik Electric Power System
• 1895 – Guglielmo Marconi's Experiments in Wireless Telegraphy
• 1895 – Electrification by Baltimore and Ohio Railroad
• 1897 – Early Swiss Wireless Experiments that sent a signal over one and a half kilometers.
• 1897 – Chivilingo Hydroelectric Plant
• 1898 – Decew Falls Hydro-Electric Plant
• 1898 – Rheinfelden Hydroelectric Power Plant
• 1899 – First Operational Use Of Wireless Telegraphy in the Anglo-Boer War

1900–1920

• 1900 – Georgetown Steam Hydro Generating Plant
• 1901 – Transmission of Transatlantic Radio Signals
• 1901 – Reception of Transatlantic Radio Signals
• 1901 – Early Developments in Remote-Control by Leonardo Torres-Quevedo
• 1902 – Poulsen-Arc Radio Transmitter
• 1903 – Vucje Hydroelectric Plant
• 1904 – Alexanderson Radio Alternator
• 1904 – Fleming Valve
• 1906 – Pinawa Hydroelectric Power Project
• 1906 – First Wireless Radio Broadcast by Reginald A. Fessenden
• 1906 – Grand Central Terminal Electrification
• 1907 – Alternating-Current Electrification of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad
• 1909 – Shoshone Transmission Line
• 1911 – Discovery of superconductivity
• 1914 – Panama Canal Electrical and Control Installations

1920–1930

• 1920 – Westinghouse Radio Station KDKA (AM)
• 1920 – Funkerberg Königs Wusterhausen first radio broadcast in Germany
• 1924 – Directive Short Wave Antenna (Yagi-Uda antenna)
• 1924 – Enrico Fermi's Major Contribution to Semiconductor Statistics
• 1924–1941 – Development of Electronic Television
• 1925 – Bell Telephone Laboratories
• 1928 – One-Way Police Radio Communication
• 1929 – Shannon Scheme for the Electrification of the Irish Free State
• 1929 – Yosami Radio Transmitting Station
• 1929 – Largest Private (dc) Generating Plant in the U.S.A.
• 1929 – First Blind Takeoff, Flight and Landing

1930–1950

• 1930–1945 – Development of Ferrite Materials and Their Applications
• 1931 – Invention of Stereo Sound Reproduction
• 1932 – First Breaking of Enigma Code by the Team of Polish Cipher Bureau
• 1933 – Two-Way Police Radio Communication
• 1934 – Long-Range Shortwave Voice Transmissions from Byrd's Antarctic Expedition
• 1937 – Westinghouse Atom Smasher
• 1938 – Zenit Parabolic Reflector L-Band Pulsed Radar
• 1939 – Atanasoff–Berry Computer
• 1939 – Claude Shannon, development of Information Theory
• 1939 – Single-element Unidirectional Microphone - Shure Unidyne
• 1940 – FM Police Radio Communication
• 1941 – Opana Radar Site
• 1939–1945 – Code-breaking at Bletchley Park during World War II
• 1940–1945 – MIT Radiation Laboratory
• 1942–1945 – US Naval Computing Machine Laboratory
• 1945 – Merrill Wheel-Balancing System
• 1945 – Rincón del Bonete Plant and Transmission System
• 1946 – Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC)
• 1947 – Invention of the First Transistor at Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc.
• 1947 – Invention of Holography
• 1948 – Birth of the Barcode
• 1948 – Junction transistor at Bell Labs

1950–1960

• 1950 – First External Cardiac Pacemaker
• 1951 – Manufacture of Transistors
• 1951 – Experimental Breeder Reactor I
• 1946–1953 – Monochrome-Compatible Electronic Color Television
• 1954 - HVDC Gotland, the first fully commercial static plant for high-voltage direct current transmission (HVDC)
• 1955 – WEIZAC Computer
• 1956 – RAMAC
• 1956 – Ampex Videotape Recorder
• 1956 – The First Submarine Transatlantic Telephone Cable System (TAT-1)
• 1957–1958 – First Wearable Cardiac Pacemaker
• 1958 – First Semiconductor Integrated Circuit (IC) by Jack Kilby
• 1959 – Semiconductor planar process by Jean Hoerni and silicon integrated circuit by Robert Noyce
• 1959 – MOSFET (metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor), also known as the MOS transistor, by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs
• 1959 – Commercialization and industrialization of photovoltaic cells by Sharp Corporation

1960–1970

• 1960–1984 – IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center
• 1961–1964 – First Optical Fiber Laser and Amplifier
• 1962 – Mercury spacecraft MA-6, Col. John Glenn piloted the Mercury Friendship 7 spacecraft in the first FAI-legal completed human-orbital flight on 20 February 1962.[2]
• 1962 – Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
• 1962 – First Transatlantic Transmission of a Television Signal via Satellite
• 1962 – First Transatlantic Television Signal via Satellite
• 1962 – First Transatlantic Reception of a Television Signal via Satellite
• 1962 – Alouette-ISIS Satellite Program
• 1962–1967 – Pioneering Work on the Quartz Electronic Wristwatch
• 1963 – NAIC/Arecibo Radiotelescope
• 1963 – First Transpacific Reception of a Television (TV) Signal via Satellite
• 1963 – Taum Sauk Pumped-Storage Electric Power Plant
• 1963 – ASCII
• 1964 – Mount Fuji Radar System
• 1964 – Tokaido Shinkansen (Bullet Train)
• 1964 – High-definition television
• 1964 – TPC-1 Transpacific Cable System
• 1964–1973 – Pioneering Work on Electronic Calculators by Sharp Corporation
• 1965 – First 735 kV AC Transmission System
• 1965 – Dadda multiplier
• 1965–1971 – Railroad Ticketing Examining System (developed by OMRON of Japan)
• 1966 – Interactive Video Games
• 1966 – Shakey, the first mobile robot to be able to reason about its own actions[3]
• 1966 – First online search system Dialog, originally developed in Lockheed Martin, now owned by ProQuest
• 1967 – First Astronomical Observations Using Very Long Baseline Interferometry
• 1968 – Liquid Crystal Display by George H. Heilmeier
• 1968 – CERN Experimental Instrumentation
• 1969 – Birth of the Internet
• 1969 – Inception of the ARPANET
• 1950–1969 – Electronic Technology for Space Rocket Launches
• 1969 – Electronic Quartz Wristwatch

1970–present

• 1970 - SPICE Circuit Simulation Program
• 1971–1978 – The First Word Processor for the Japanese Language
• 1972 – Nelson River HVDC Transmission System
• 1972 – Development of the HP-35, the First Handheld Scientific Calculator
• 1974 – Birth of CP/M Operating System
• 1975 – Gapless Metal Oxide Surge Arrester (MOSA) for electric power systems
• 1975 – Line Spectrum Pair (LSP) for high-compression speech coding (developed by NTT)
• 1976 – Development of VHS, a World Standard for Home Video Recording
• 1976 – Introduction of the Apple I Computer
• 1977 – Introduction of the Apple II Computer
• 1977 – Lempel–Ziv Data Compression Algorithm
• 1977 – Vapor-phase Axial Deposition Method for Mass Production of High-quality Optical Fiber
• 1978 – Digital Image from Synthetic Aperture Radar
• 1978 – Speak & Spell, the First Use of a Digital Signal Processing IC for Speech Generation
• 1979 – Compact Disc Audio Player
• 1979 – 20-inch Diameter Photomultiplier Tubes
• 1980 – International Standardization of Group 3 Facsimile
• 1980 – RISC (Reduced Instruction-Set Computing) Microprocessor
• 1981 – 16-Bit Monolithic Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC) for Digital Audio
• 1981 – Map-Based Automotive Navigation System
• 1984 – First Direct-broadcast satellite Service
• 1984 – The MU (Middle and Upper atmosphere) radar
• 1985 – Toshiba T1100, for Contribution to the Development of Laptop PCs
• 1985 – Emergency Warning Code Signal Broadcasting System
• 1987 – High Temperature Superconductor
• 1987 – SPARC RISC Architecture
• 1988 – Sharp 14-Inch Thin Film Transistor Liquid-Crystal Display (TFT-LCD) for TV
• 1988 – Solid State High Voltage DC Converter Station
• 1988 – Trans-Atlantic Telephone Fiber-optic Submarine Cable, TAT-8
• 1988 – Virginia Smith High-Voltage Direct-Current Converter Station
• 1989 – Development of CDMA for Cellular Communications

Special citations

• 1856–1943 – Nikola Tesla, Electrical Pioneer
• 1979 – Computer History Museum

References

1. List of IEEE Milestones
2. While Soviet spacecraft had made human orbital flights prior, they are not FAI-certified, because the pilots ejected from the spacecraft before landing, which by FAI rules denotes an uncompleted (or failed) flight.
3. "SRI International's Shakey the Robot to be Honored with "IEEE Milestone" at the Computer History Museum". Retrieved 2017-02-17.

External links

• List of IEEE Milestones
• IEEE History Center: Milestones Introduction
• IEEE Global History Network: List of IEEE Milestones
• Archive by category 'IEEE Milestones'