Electrical Engineering Trivia
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This electrical engineering trivia quiz has 99 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 01Which physicist quit a Cologne teaching post when an 1827 treatise on circuits met a cold reception?
Ohm
Georg Ohm resigned his post at a school in Cologne after the cold reception. Recognition came from abroad, when Britain's Royal Society awarded him its Copley Medal in 1841.
Q 02Alessandro Volta built the first battery while disputing which fellow Italian's theory of 'animal electricity' in frogs' legs?
Luigi Galvani
Luigi Galvani believed the twitching came from electricity inside the animal. Volta argued that it came from two different metals touching, and proved his point by stacking metal discs into a battery.
Q 03The Leyden jar, invented independently in 1745-46, was the original form of which component?
The capacitor
The capacitor began as an accident: an experimenter in Leiden, holding a jar of water charged through a wire, touched the wire and took a powerful shock, proof that the jar had been storing charge.
Q 04Michael Faraday's spinning copper disc of 1831 is called the first electric what?
Generator
A generator: the turning disc gave a small but continuous current. Ten years earlier Faraday had built the reverse, a simple motor that turned current into motion.
Q 05The SI unit of inductance is named after which American scientist?
Joseph Henry
Joseph Henry was beaten into print on induction by Michael Faraday, then became the first to notice self-induction while working with his electromagnets. He later ran the Smithsonian as its first secretary.
Q 06A farad is defined as one of which unit per volt?
Coulomb
Coulomb is the unit: one farad stores one coulomb of charge for every volt applied. That makes the farad enormous, so everyday parts are rated in millionths or even trillionths of one.
Q 07Who set out the two basic circuit laws as a 21-year-old student?
Gustav Kirchhoff
Gustav Kirchhoff set them out in 1845 while studying at Königsberg. He later turned to light, and with Robert Bunsen used a spectroscope to discover two new elements, caesium and rubidium.
Q 08Who rewrote Maxwell's equations into the compact four-equation vector form used today?
Oliver Heaviside
Oliver Heaviside left school at 16 and had no further formal education. He worked as a telegraph operator, studied Maxwell's theory on his own, and cut its sprawling set of equations down to the four taught today.
Q 09A radar set is said to have melted a candy bar in Percy Spencer's pocket, inspiring which kitchen appliance?
The microwave oven
The microwave oven followed once Spencer tested the effect on purpose, holding popcorn kernels near the radar equipment until they popped. Raytheon's first model, sold in 1947, stood about six feet tall.
Q 10Nikola Tesla's alternating-current motor and polyphase patents were licensed in 1888 by which company?
Westinghouse Electric
Westinghouse Electric paid in cash, stock and a royalty on every horsepower sold. When the company later ran short of money, Tesla agreed to give up the royalty so that it could keep backing his motor.
Q 11The tesla was adopted as the SI unit of what in 1960?
Magnetic flux density
Magnetic flux density took Nikola Tesla's name in 1960, a late honour: he had died nearly penniless in 1943 after years of moving between New York hotels and leaving the bills unpaid.
Q 12Which tycoon backed Nikola Tesla's Wardenclyffe Tower, then refused to fund a larger design?
J. P. Morgan
J. P. Morgan had put up $150,000 for a transatlantic wireless station. When Tesla enlarged the plan to send power as well as messages, Morgan declined to pay more, and the tower was abandoned without ever working.
Q 13In 1890 Thomas Edison's allies made sure a rival's alternating-current generator powered the first of which devices?
Q 21Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit in 1958 while newly employed by which company?
Texas Instruments
Texas Instruments had hired Kilby only a couple of months before its summer shutdown, so he had no holiday to take. Alone in the deserted lab, he thought up the chip and had one working by September.
Q 22Which 'Mayor of Silicon Valley' devised the first practical silicon integrated circuit and co-founded Fairchild and Intel?
Robert Noyce
Robert Noyce's design laid the connections onto the silicon itself, where Jack Kilby's rival chip of a few months earlier had needed them wired by hand. That made his the version that could be mass-produced.
Q 23How many engineers left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor?
The electric chair
The electric chair was the point: if the state killed with a rival's alternating current, the public might think it too dangerous for the home. The same campaign had stray animals electrocuted in public.
Q 14In 1896 the new power station at Niagara Falls began sending alternating current over long-distance lines to which city?
Buffalo
Buffalo was lit by Niagara's power that November. The feat is often counted as the unofficial end of the war of the currents, with alternating current the winner over direct.
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 Germany and Osaka bought 60 Hz machines from the United States. The split hampered efforts to share power after the 2011 earthquake.
Q 16Who invented the first vacuum tube, the two-element valve, in 1904?
John Ambrose Fleming
John Ambrose Fleming built it on the 'Edison effect', a one-way current that Thomas Edison had noticed inside his light bulbs some twenty years earlier. Fleming put it to work detecting radio signals.
Q 17What did Lee de Forest call his three-element amplifying tube, the first practical electronic amplifier?
The Audion
The Audion worked, yet de Forest had little idea how or why, and his early tubes behaved erratically. It took other engineers several more years to turn it into a dependable amplifier.
Q 18Which three Bell Labs physicists shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for the transistor?
Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley
Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley shared the prize, though the first two built the first transistor without the third. Furious at being left out, Shockley devised a sturdier design of his own within weeks.
Q 19Before silicon took over, which semiconductor crystal was used in the first transistor in 1947?
Germanium
Germanium worked, but transistors made from it could not take much heat. Silicon, which keeps going at higher temperatures, began to replace it once the first silicon transistors were made in 1954.
Q 20Who invented the first working MOSFET at Bell Labs in 1959?
Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng
Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng made an old idea work: Lilienfeld and Heil had patented field-effect devices in the 1920s and 1930s, but neither is known to have built one that functioned.
Eight
Eight left, and 'the traitorous eight' is said to have been Shockley's own label for them. They had asked his backer to replace him as manager, were refused, and walked out together to start a rival firm.
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 Moore's slower revision of the yearly doubling he had first forecast a decade earlier. Chipmakers then planned their research around the rule, which helped make it a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Q 25The IEEE was formed in 1963 by merging the IRE with which older body?
The American Institute of Electrical Engineers
The American Institute of Electrical Engineers was the elder by 28 years. But the Institute of Radio Engineers grew faster as electronics boomed, and by the late 1950s it was the larger of the two.
Q 26Which company, in 1922, made Edith Clarke the first woman employed as an electrical engineer in the United States?
General Electric
General Electric had first hired her as a human 'computer', since she could not find work as an engineer despite a master's degree from MIT. She later became the country's first female professor of electrical engineering.
Q 27Superconductivity was discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes while cooling which metal?
Mercury
Mercury lost all resistance a few degrees above absolute zero, a test possible only because Onnes had been first to liquefy helium three years earlier. He named the effect 'supraconductivity'.
Q 28Samuel Hunter Christie invented which resistance-measuring circuit in 1833?
The Wheatstone bridge
The Wheatstone bridge bears the wrong man's name: Christie's description went largely unnoticed for a decade, until Charles Wheatstone brought it to wide notice in 1843.
Q 29The decibel grew out of measuring transmission loss in which industry?
Telephony
Telephony engineers coined the decibel in 1928 to replace the dry label 'transmission unit'. The bel itself, named after Alexander Graham Bell, proved too large for everyday use, so a tenth of it became the standard.
Q 30The hertz honours Heinrich Hertz, who in the 1880s became the first to prove the existence of what?
Radio waves
Radio waves struck Hertz as a laboratory curiosity: asked what his discovery was good for, he is said to have answered that it was 'of no use whatsoever'. He died at 36, before radio proved him wrong.