History

The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science is a component of The College of Engineering at The University of Tennessee (UT). The nascent discipline of engineering was reflected in the first published institutional catalogue (1838), with the listing of Joseph Estabrook as President and lecturer in Chemistry, Mineralogy, etc. The study of Engineering at UT traces its roots to lectures on engineering and architecture provided for students in their final year of study, which courses were first listed in the Catalogue of 1844.

Following designation of The University as Tennessee's Land Grant institution in 1869, under the 1862 Morrill Act provisions, the field today now known as “Engineering” was established as a primary emphasis of the institution. The Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science had its beginning with the recruitment of Dr. Charles Perkins to UT in 1892 as Associate Professor of Physics and Electricity -at a time electricity was making its appearance as the choice for lighting and motors, and at the very time that the Colombian World Exposition in Chicago would choose alternating current over direct current, and incandescent light bulbs for illumination of the “White City” of the Exposition.

Led by its distinguished first professor, Charles Perkins, who was the author of a widely used textbook in electrical engineering, the Department graduated its first student in 1895. Its early efforts were applauded by President Brown Ayres (UT President, 1904-1919) who, in studying for the Ph.D. in Engineering at Stevens Institute in 1888 had pursued study in electricity and was serving, at the time of his appointment to the UT Presidency, as Acting President of Tulane University and Professor of Physics and Electrical Engineering. Ayres had also served upon the Jury of Electricity at the 1893 Colombian Exposition (Chicago), the 1895 Cotton States Exposition (Atlanta) and the Tennessee Centennial Exposition in Nashville (1897).

In 1936, when a committee of the Engineering Council for Professional Development (now Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) conducted its first review of a Southern engineering program according to the standards set by the organization, the departments of Electrical, Civil, and Mechanical Engineering were accredited. In 1958, the Department brought to campus the first real digital computer, a Librascope General Purpose 30-bit computer, which took almost a second to multiply two numbers. That the Department continued to be regarded as outstanding in the country was indicated by the results of a study reported in the Yale daily newspaper in 1988 ranking the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at UT as the foremost Engineering Department of The University, and the College of Engineering as the foremost College of the institution.

The Department has had a distinguished array of faculty in its history, including the first Benwood Distinguished Service Professorship, awarded in 1964 to Dr. J. Frank Pierce. It has also had a number of outstanding graduates, for example:

• Clarence Leon Brown received baccalaureate degrees in Electrical and in Mechanical Engineering in 1910. He became an internationally acclaimed movie producer and director, whose films won eight Oscars and were nominated for 38. His understanding of the technical aspects of the business of film making set him apart from his peers.

• John Bewley Derieux, class of 1914, earned both the B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from UT, and the Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Chicago. He served as chief electrician for the U.S. Bureau of the Census before joining the faculty of North Carolina State University, where he achieved international recognition as a theoretical physicist.

• Min Kao earned a M.S. (1975) and Ph.D (1977) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Tennessee. Dr. Kao now serves as Chairman and CEO of Garmin International, Inc., a company he co-founded with Gary Burrell, now retired. Today, in a crowded, fiercely-competitive and highly price-sensitive field of GPS hardware, Garmin is the world leader. Very little about the core technology is proprietary, and signals from the 27 U.S. Department of Defense satellites are free and available to anyone. Garmin has established itself as a world leader in large part because of its ability to bring its own engineering and manufacturing resources to bear on the production process.

• Mark Dean, a 1979 alumnus, is a member of the elite IBM Inventors' Hall of Fame. He earned 3 of the original 9 IBM personal computer patents, and developed the IBM PC AT. His team also developed the 1 GHz chip, in 1994.

• Martha Springer Polson, a 1979 graduate, was the first female national president of Tau Beta Pi, when she began her term in 1986. She had previously won an award from the Society of Women Engineers as that group's “Distinguished New Engineer.”

• Steve Zimmerman, earned both the bachelor's (1984) and master's (1992) degrees. He devised the core technology for 360×360 digital images.

Through a generous financial pledge from Dr. Min Kao, a new home for Electrical and Computer Engineering broke ground in May 2007.

On July 1, 2007, the The University of Tennessee College of Engineering's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the College of Arts and Sciences' Department of Computer Science (CS) were officially merged as the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). [ Press Release...]

In October 2008, the University of Tennessee Board of Trustees approved naming of the Min H. Kao Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Min H. Kao Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Building in honor of Dr. Kao.