1909

Iowa State’s Department of Electrical Engineering is formed

1914

Alumnus Paul Spencer Clapp is an engineer on the first transcontinental telephone line

1915

Telephone Switchboard Laboratory is created

1921

Department constructs its own radio tower and station; begins broadcasting in 1922

1927

Ronald J. Rockwell joins Crosley Corporation where he pioneered radio, high-fidelity, and television technologies, as well as designed the first high-resolution TV transmitter in the Midwest

1939

Graduate Student Clifford Berry co-creates world’s first electronic digital computer

1947

U.S. Department of Energy establishes Ames Laboratory

1950

Professors Warren B. Boast and John D. “Jack” Ryder construct AC Network Analyzer; Tetrode neutralization, invented by Alumnus Warren B. Bruene, is used universally in radio transmitters

1957

Biomedical electronics program begins

1958

Alumnus and Professor William L. Hughes develops new method of recording and reproducing color TV signals using 35 mm black-and-white film

1959

The first courses in analog and digital computers are offered; Cyclone Computer is completed

1962

Professor Alvin A. Read begins courses on lasers

1963

The Electric Power Research Center (formerly called the Power Affiliate Research Program) is created

1964

Professor David L. Carlson creates infant respiratory augmenter

1967

Anson Marston Distinguished Professor R. Grover Brown begins early GPS research

1971

Graduate Student David C. Nicholas invents the encoding process for fax machines

1972

Alumnus Thomas M. Whitney develops the world’s first hand-held scientific calculator, the HP-35

1973

Alumnus Donald Linder’s Motorola team develops the world’s first portable phone

1980

Alumnus David Ditzel coauthors the famous paper "The Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer." Ditzel was co-originator of the RISC concept. Later, he also was a designer of high-performance SPARC-based computers for Sun Microsystems

1982

Howard Shanks establishes Microelectronics Research Center

1984

Alumnus Edward R. McCracken begins working for Silicon Graphics and helps company develop 3-D graphics machines that launched the “world of virtual reality”

Distinguished Professor Arthur V. Pohm co-invents Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM), a revolutionary computer memory technology

1985

Center for Nondestructive Evaluation is formed

Alumnus Bob O. Evans receives the National Medal of Technology for conceiving the first compatible family of commercial computers at IBM in the 1960s

1988

VLSI Design Center is created

1990

Iowa State’s Virtual Reality Applications Center is established

1996

Students build the first Cybot; Department joins Power Systems Engineering Research Center

1998

Alumnus Kenneth M. Peterson is one of three engineers to create Motorola’s IRIDIUM, a worldwide communication system using satellite phones

1999

Information Assurance Center is founded; information assurance graduate program begins

2002

Information Infrastructure Institute is created

2003

University Professor and Alumnus Doug Jacobson creates world’s first Internet-Scale Event and Attack Generation Environment

2006

Alumnus Sehat Sutardja is named Inventor of the Year

CyBlue, an IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, is acquired for bioinformatics research

2007

Iowa State established CyberInnovation Institute

2008

Alumnus James M. Daughton receives IEEE’s Daniel E. Noble Award for fundamental contributions to the technology that became known as Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM), a form of memory that is faster, uses less energy, and is more durable than other memory technologies.