The birth of electrical engineering
In September 1882, Thomas Edison opened the first commercial power plant in the United States, serving 59 customers in a square mile of Lower Manhattan. That same fall, MIT made electrical history of its own, with the establishment of the country’s first electrical-engineering curriculum.Edison’s power plant was the latest in a flurry of electrical breakthroughs, beginning with the first successful transatlantic telegraph cable in 1866, the demonstration of the first working telephone in 1876 and Edison’s first light bulb in 1879. Still, the need for an autonomous discipline of electrical engineering was by no means obvious to the world at large. Indeed, the role of the engineering disciplines in general wasn’t obvious to the world at large. But a vision of that role had, in large part, animated the founding of MIT in 1861.According to Paul Penfield, professor emeritus of electrical engineering, the idea of a technical university “seems so...