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.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In what year did Georg Ohm publish the treatise setting out Ohm's law?
1827
Henry Cavendish had found the same relationship in 1781 but never published; Maxwell revealed his notes in 1879. Kirchhoff later reformulated the law in its modern form.
Q 02Which Italian chemist built the first continuous-current battery and published his experiments in 1799?
Alessandro Volta
His pile of zinc and copper discs enabled the electrolysis of water within a year and Humphry Davy's isolation of sodium, potassium and calcium soon after.
Q 03The Leyden jar, invented independently in 1745-46, was the original form of which component?
The capacitor
Ewald Georg von Kleist and Pieter van Musschenbroek of Leiden both stumbled on it. It stores charge between conductors on the inside and outside of a glass jar.
Q 04In which year did Michael Faraday discover electromagnetic induction?
1831
His lab diary for 28 October records experiments with the Royal Society's great magnet. Joseph Henry found the same effect independently in America at about the same time.
Q 05The SI unit of inductance is named after which American scientist?
Joseph Henry
A coil has one henry of inductance when a current changing at one ampere per second produces one volt across it. He discovered induction independently of Faraday.
Q 06The farad, the SI unit of capacitance, is defined as one unit of charge per volt. Which unit?
Coulomb
A one-farad capacitor is enormous by everyday standards; most circuits use microfarads or picofarads. It is named after Michael Faraday.
Q 07In what year did Gustav Kirchhoff first describe his current and voltage laws for circuits?
1845
The current law says currents into a node sum to zero; the voltage law says voltages around a loop do. They hold for DC and for AC where wavelengths dwarf the circuit.
Q 08Who rewrote Maxwell's equations into the compact four-equation vector form used today?
Oliver Heaviside
He also patented the coaxial cable, formulated the telegrapher's equations and coined 'inductance', 'conductance' and 'permeability'.
Q 09Which of these terms did the man who rewrote Maxwell's equations coin in July 1886?
Impedance
He also gave us admittance, permittivity, reluctance and inductance. He is often wrongly credited with reactance and susceptance.
Q 10Nikola Tesla's AC induction motor and polyphase patents were licensed in 1888 by which company?
Westinghouse Electric
They became the cornerstone of the polyphase system Westinghouse marketed against Edison's DC. Tesla was born in Smiljan in 1856.
Q 11The tesla was adopted as the SI unit of what in 1960?
Magnetic flux density
The naming by the General Conference on Weights and Measures pulled Tesla's reputation out of decades of obscurity after his 1943 death.
Q 12What was Tesla's unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island intended to be?
A wireless power and communication transmitter
He ran out of funding before completing it, after high-voltage experiments in New York and Colorado Springs.
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
Robert Noyce at Fairchild independently produced the first monolithic silicon chip months later. Kilby received 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
He was one of the 'traitorous eight' who left Shockley Semiconductor in 1957 to found Fairchild.
Q 23How many engineers left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor?
Eight
Shockley called them the 'traitorous eight'. He had set up his lab in Mountain View in 1955 to build a four-layer diode.
It was hazardous and infringed their patents
AC's advantage was that transformers could step high transmission voltages down for indoor use. Edison even recommended AC and a Westinghouse generator for the first electric chair.
Q 14The Adams station at Niagara Falls, opened in 1895, was the world's first what?
Large-scale AC generating plant
Only its transformer house survives, now a National Historic Landmark. It followed an 1886 plan to tap the falls with a 7,500-foot brick-lined tunnel.
Q 15Which country runs both 50 Hz and 60 Hz mains grids?
Japan
Most of the world uses 50 Hz with 220-240 V; the Americas mostly use 60 Hz with 100-127 V. There is no strong technical reason to prefer either.
Q 16Who invented the first vacuum tube, the two-element valve, in 1904?
John Ambrose Fleming
Adding a control grid produced the triode, which could amplify as well as rectify and made radio and early computing possible.
Q 17What did Lee de Forest call his three-element amplifying tube, the first practical electronic amplifier?
The Audion
He styled himself the 'Father of Radio' and used the phrase as the title of his 1950 autobiography. His Yale doctorate was on Hertzian waves.
Q 18Which three Bell Labs physicists shared the 1956 Nobel Prize for the transistor?
Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley
The first point-contact device came in December 1947 when two gold contacts on a germanium crystal produced more output power than input. Bardeen won a second Nobel for superconductivity theory.
Q 19What semiconductor crystal was used in the first point-contact transistor in 1947?
Germanium
Silicon took over later, in part because of Mohamed Atalla's work on surface passivation and thermal oxidation at Bell Labs.
Q 20Who invented the first working MOSFET at Bell Labs in 1959?
Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng
It is now the most manufactured device in history. Lilienfeld and Heil had patented field-effect ideas decades earlier but never built a working one.
Q 24In its 1975 revision, Moore's law says the transistor count on an integrated circuit doubles roughly how often?
Every two years
Gordon Moore's original 1965 observation was a doubling every year; the 1975 revision to two years is a compound growth rate 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 AIEE dated to 1884; the IRE was its rival from 1912. The merged body is now the world's largest technical professional organisation.
Q 26Which of these distinctions belongs to Edith Clarke?
First woman professionally employed as a US EE
She was also the country's first female professor of electrical engineering, and the Department of Energy calls her power-network analysis 'the first step toward smart grid technology'.
Q 27Superconductivity was discovered in 1911 by Heike Kamerlingh Onnes while cooling which metal?
Mercury
At 4.2 K the resistance abruptly vanished. He was using newly produced liquid helium as the refrigerant in Leiden.
Q 28The Wheatstone bridge for measuring resistance was actually invented in 1833 by whom?
Samuel Hunter Christie
Wheatstone improved and popularised it a decade later, and his name stuck. It balances two legs of a bridge circuit to find an unknown resistance.
Q 29The decibel grew out of measuring transmission loss in which industry?
Telephony
Bell Labs introduced the 'transmission unit' in 1924, later renamed the decibel; the bel honours Alexander Graham Bell but is rarely used on its own.
Q 30The hertz is named after Heinrich Hertz for being the first to do what?
Conclusively prove electromagnetic waves exist
His 1880s experiments confirmed Maxwell's predictions. The unit replaced 'cycles per second' in the SI.