Who: Thomas H. Lee, Professor of Electrical Engineering, Stanford University Director of DARPA Microsystems Technology Office
What: The Victorian Moon Program: The Great Transatlantic Telegraph Cable (Who Invented the Ohm, and Why?)
When/Where: Friday, March 16, 2012 @ 1:30 pm – Olin College, Academic Center, Rm 113 (iCal)
Topic Abstract: Electrical engineers are the children of a failure so great in magnitude that few EEs are ever taught about the embarrassing origins of their profession. The man most responsible is Cyrus Field, who gave us the 19th century's equivalent of the Moon program: the laying of the first transatlantic telegraph cable. Spanning the Atlantic without amplifiers is even harder than it sounds; Field's multiple attempts between 1858 and 1866 were marked by humiliating failure and interruption by the American Civil War. A British board of inquiry convened to study the failure identified several problems, including Field's near total reliance on a medical doctor for technical advice, as well as a frustrating lack of a technical vocabulary even to describe aspects of the failure itself. The response to this analysis was the creation of the language and profession of electrical engineering, with William Thomson, as new technical lead for the project, as perhaps the first professional electrical engineer. For making the 1866 cable a success, Thomson was knighted, and eventually became Lord Kelvin. This talk will describe the technical history of the cable project, and how electrical engineering emerged as a profession in direct response to Field's failures.
About the speaker: Dr. Thomas Lee has been on the faculty of Stanford University since 1994, where he has taught and carried out research in the broad area of analog and RF engineering for communications, sensing, power conversion and control. He holds 57 U.S. patents and authored The Design of CMOS Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuits (now in its second edition) and Planar Microwave Engineering. He has received several “Best Paper” Awards from ISSCC and CICC, was recognized as an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer, is a Packard Foundation Fellowship recipient, and was presented with the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Excellence Award.
Dr. Lee received the S.B., S.M. and Sc.D. degrees in electrical engineering, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has founded or co-founded several companies including Matrix Semiconductor and ZeroG Wireless. He is the recipient of the 2011 Ho-Am Prize in Engineering, colloquially known as “the Korean Nobel,” awarded for his work in CMOS RF integrated circuits.