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This electrical engineering trivia quiz has 50 free questions with answers and covers the people, laws, devices and units that built the field: Volta's pile and the Leyden jar, Ohm's 1827 treatise, Faraday and Henry discovering induction, Kirchhoff's laws, Maxwell's equations and the man who rewrote them, Tesla's induction motor and the war of the currents, the Niagara plant, the Fleming valve and the Audion, the 1947 transistor, the integrated circuit, the MOSFET and Moore's law. It also covers the units engineers use every day and who they are named after, the odd history of the decibel and the Wheatstone bridge, superconductivity, the first transistor radio, the first woman professionally employed as an electrical engineer in the US, and how the IEEE came to be. The early questions suit anyone who has done a school physics course; the later ones are for people who know which term Heaviside coined and which year superconductivity was found. Every answer was checked against a reference source and each question shows its citation once you have answered.
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Q 01In what year did Georg Ohm publish the treatise setting out Ohm's law?
1827
Georg Ohm published Die galvanische Kette, mathematisch bearbeitet in 1827, stating that current is proportional to voltage. Henry Cavendish had found the same relationship in 1781 but never published it.
Q 02Which Italian scientist announced the first continuous-current battery in 1800?
Alessandro Volta
Alessandro Volta described his pile of alternating zinc and copper discs in a March 1800 letter to the Royal Society; within weeks Nicholson and Carlisle used one to electrolyse water.
Q 03The Leyden jar, invented independently in 1745-46, was the original form of which component?
The capacitor
The capacitor descends from the Leyden jar: Ewald Georg von Kleist and Pieter van Musschenbroek of Leiden both found that a glass jar with inner and outer conductors stores charge.
Q 04In which year did Michael Faraday discover electromagnetic induction?
1831
Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction in 1831: his diary for 29 August 1831 records the induction ring, and on 28 October he spun a copper disc between the poles of the Royal Society's great magnet.
Q 05The SI unit of inductance is named after which American scientist?
Joseph Henry
Joseph Henry, the American who discovered self-induction, gives his name to the henry: a coil has one henry of inductance when a current changing at one ampere per second induces one volt.
Q 06A farad is defined as which unit of electric charge per volt?
Coulomb
The Coulomb is the SI unit of charge, and one farad is one coulomb per volt; a one-farad capacitor is enormous next to the microfarads and picofarads in most circuits.
Q 07In what year did Gustav Kirchhoff first describe his current and voltage laws for circuits?
1845
Gustav Kirchhoff stated both laws in 1845, while a student at Königsberg: currents into a node sum to zero, and voltages around a closed loop sum to zero.
Q 08Who rewrote Maxwell's equations into the compact four-equation vector form used today?
Oliver Heaviside
Oliver Heaviside recast Maxwell's twenty equations into the four vector equations used today; he also patented coaxial cable in 1880 and coined 'inductance', 'conductance' and 'permeability'.
Q 09Which of these terms did the man who rewrote Maxwell's equations coin in July 1886?
Impedance
Impedance was his July 1886 coinage for the AC counterpart of resistance; he also gave us admittance, permittivity, reluctance and inductance, while reactance and susceptance came from others.
Q 10Nikola Tesla's AC induction motor and polyphase patents were licensed in 1888 by which company?
Westinghouse Electric
Westinghouse Electric bought the licence to Tesla's polyphase patents in July 1888, making them the cornerstone of the AC system George Westinghouse marketed against Edison's DC.
Q 11The tesla was adopted as the SI unit of what in 1960?
Magnetic flux density
Magnetic flux density got the tesla as its SI unit when the 11th CGPM adopted it in 1960, seventeen years after Tesla's death in 1943.
Q 12What was Tesla's unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island intended to be?
A wireless power and communication transmitter
Tesla built Wardenclyffe from 1901 as a wireless power and communication transmitter, a 187-foot tower meant to send messages and energy across the Atlantic; J. P. Morgan's funding dried up before it worked.
Q 13In the war of the currents, what did the DC camp claim in 1888 about Westinghouse's AC system?
Q 21Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit in 1958 while newly employed by which company?
Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments hired Jack Kilby in May 1958; that September he demonstrated the first working integrated circuit there, work recognised with the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Q 22Which 'Mayor of Silicon Valley' made the first monolithic silicon integrated circuit and co-founded Fairchild and Intel?
Robert Noyce
Robert Noyce, nicknamed the 'Mayor of Silicon Valley', built the first monolithic silicon integrated circuit at Fairchild in 1959 and co-founded Intel with Gordon Moore in 1968.
Q 23How many engineers left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor?
Eight
It was hazardous and infringed their patents
Edison Electric's February 1888 pamphlet 'A Warning' claimed of Westinghouse's AC that it was hazardous and infringed their patents; Edison later backed a Westinghouse AC generator for the first electric chair in 1890.
Q 14The Adams station at Niagara Falls, opened in 1895, was the world's first what?
Large-scale AC generating plant
The Adams station was the first large-scale AC generating plant: its Westinghouse generators began sending Niagara power to Buffalo in November 1896, and only its transformer house survives, a National Historic Landmark.
Q 15Which country runs both 50 Hz and 60 Hz mains grids?
Japan
Japan has used both since the 1890s, when Tokyo bought 50 Hz generators from AEG in Germany and Osaka bought 60 Hz machines from General Electric, splitting the country roughly at the Fuji River.
Q 16Who invented the first vacuum tube, the two-element valve, in 1904?
John Ambrose Fleming
John Ambrose Fleming patented the two-electrode 'oscillation valve' in November 1904; it rectified radio signals, and adding a control grid later produced the amplifying triode.
Q 17What did Lee de Forest call his three-element amplifying tube, the first practical electronic amplifier?
The Audion
The Audion, patented in 1907, added a third electrode, the grid, to the valve; de Forest styled himself the 'Father of Radio', the title of his 1950 autobiography.
Q 18Which three Bell Labs physicists shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for the transistor?
Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley
Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley shared the 1956 prize for the transistor, first demonstrated at Bell Labs in December 1947; Bardeen won a second Nobel in 1972 for the theory of superconductivity.
Q 19What semiconductor crystal was used in the first point-contact transistor in 1947?
Germanium
Germanium was the crystal in Bell Labs' December 1947 point-contact transistor; silicon took over in the 1950s thanks to its stable oxide layer and better high-temperature behaviour.
Q 20Who invented the first working MOSFET at Bell Labs in 1959?
Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng
Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng built the device at Bell Labs in 1959 on a silicon wafer with an oxide layer; Lilienfeld and Heil had patented field-effect ideas in the 1920s and 1930s but never built a working one.
Eight engineers, dubbed the 'traitorous eight', walked out of Shockley Semiconductor in September 1957 and founded Fairchild Semiconductor with Sherman Fairchild's backing.
Q 24In its 1975 revision, Moore's law says the transistor count on an integrated circuit doubles roughly how often?
Every two years
Every two years was the pace Moore set in his 1975 revision, down from the yearly doubling of his original observation; it equals compound growth of about 41% a year.
Q 25The IEEE was formed in 1963 by merging the IRE with which older body, founded in 1884?
The American Institute of Electrical Engineers
The American Institute of Electrical Engineers, founded in 1884, merged with its younger rival the Institute of Radio Engineers (1912) on 1 January 1963 to form the IEEE.
Q 26Which of these distinctions belongs to Edith Clarke?
First woman professionally employed as a US EE
First woman professionally employed as a US EE: General Electric made Edith Clarke an engineer in 1922, and in 1947 she became the country's first female professor of electrical engineering, at the University of Texas.
Q 27Superconductivity was discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes while cooling which metal?
Mercury
Mercury's resistance vanished abruptly at 4.2 K in Onnes's Leiden laboratory in April 1911, cooled by the liquid helium he had first produced in 1908.
Q 28The Wheatstone bridge for measuring resistance was actually invented in 1833 by whom?
Samuel Hunter Christie
Samuel Hunter Christie described the circuit in 1833; Charles Wheatstone improved and popularised it in 1843 and his name stuck. It balances two legs of a bridge to find an unknown resistance.
Q 29The decibel grew out of measuring transmission loss in which industry?
Telephony
Telephony engineers at the Bell System defined the 'transmission unit' for line loss in 1924 and renamed it the decibel in 1928; the bel honours Alexander Graham Bell.
Q 30The hertz is named after Heinrich Hertz for being the first to do what?
Conclusively prove electromagnetic waves exist
Heinrich Hertz was the first to conclusively prove electromagnetic waves exist: his 1886-88 spark-gap experiments in Karlsruhe generated and detected the waves Maxwell had predicted.