When I was little, I don’t know why, but I was afraid that a theif might come into my house in the night. So I was ‘the security guard’ in my home, I locked the door every night before I went to bed.

To me, this picture generates memories of my childhood, and  reminds me of another story.

A mother and daughter lived in a cabin in the small rural village. The girl’s mother was always afraid that the theif would come in the evening, so she always put three lock on the door. However the daughter was tired of the rural life. So one day early in the morning, the daughter ran away from home while her mother was sleeping. After ten years, the grown-up daughter returned to her hometown. When she came home late at night, she found the door was unlocked.

Why was the door not locked that day? The reason is because the mother did not want her daughter not to be able to enter when the daughter came back home, which means her mother had not locked the door for over 10 years.

Image courtesy of A Stylish Wooden House In The Alps

http://cootattooo.com/a-stylish-wooden-house-in-the-alps/

In school, physics classes always introduce Albert Einstein, Newton, Michael Faraday and so many other scientists who lay a solid foundation to nowadays technology . However, engineers are those people who apply these theories to develop solutions for practical problems. And usually real technical problems are solved by a company or a group of people. So when we were asked to say the names of famous engineers, it’s easy to say a device instead of a specific name. I think each engineer might make a contribution to his/her own field no matter how small or large, so I will start with ordinary engineer, and then move on to  2 famous electrical engineers.

My grandfather — people I know most in EE field

I probably should talk about a very famous scientist or engineer here, but in my opinion,  most things about them are just facts and history.  So, I am going to describe a person in the electrical engineering field from a very different perspective. My grandpa is not as famous as Dr.Qian Xuesen, but indeed he made some influential contribution to china’s Aerospace industry. He is a radar electronics expert worked in Academy of China Aerospace.
First, his biggest trait is that he always tries to pursue the real truth in scientific problems. In my dearest memory, he always sat in front of the desk and never ceased to read books and work on problems. Even though sometimes he could not work out my high school math and physics problems, he would think for a long time until he figured it out.
Second, my grandpa always looks young and keeps a fresh curiosity for anything new, although he is 80 years old now. He loves Hi-Fi, he likes to go to the electronics markets and assemble high quality audio power amplifiers at home. Also, although during his career, there wasnt computer programs like C, C++, java, etc. He started to learn programming after retiring; he always says he needs to keep up with nowadays technology. So young engineers still find him for help, because he is still an expert.

Apart from my grandfather, many other scientists have contributed to the world of electrical engineering. . The first thing comes into my head is a semiconductor, which was the most important invention in 20th century.

William Shockley—father of semiconductor

The development of electronic and computer technology is closely related with the development of micro-miniature of electronic components, especially the development of IC technology. William Shockley’s invention is known as a semiconductor, which helped to create a new industry, one that underlies all of modern electronics, from supercomputers to talking greeting cards. Today the world produces about as many transistors as printed characters in all the newspapers, books, magazines and computer and electronic-copier pages combined.

Shortly after the end of the war in 1945, Bell Labs formed a Solid State Physics Group, led by Shockley, some chemists and several technicians. Their assignment was to seek a solid-state alternative to fragile glass vacuum tube amplifiers. Its first attempts were based on Shockley’s ideas about using an external electrical field on a semiconductor to affect its conductivity.
It was Shockley who brought the silicon to Silicon Valley. This new company became the mother organization for several dozen new companies in Silicon Valley. Nearly all the scores of companies that are or have been active in semiconductor technology can trace the technical lineage of their founders back through Fairchild to the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Unintentionally, Shockley contributed to one of the most spectacular and successful industry expansions in history.
Communication is a basic and important application of electronics. In the 19th century, people could only exchange information through wired telegraph by Morse Code. In 1895, Italian physicist Guylielmo Marconi carried on a successful radio communication experiment, and a trans-Atlantic radio communication in 1901. Since then radio application had been widely spread to different areas, along with the development electronic technology. Nowadays we can say people cannot survive without the radio, for electronic communication has been involved in every respect in every minute.

Nikola Tesla—important contributor to the birth of commercial electricity

Tesla was best known for his many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla’s patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems, including the polyphase system of electrical distribution and the AC motor. This work helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.
Because of his 1894 demonstration of wireless communication through radio and as the eventual victor in the “War of Currents”, he was widely respected as one of the greatest electrical engineers who worked in America. He pioneered modern electrical engineering and many of his discoveries were of groundbreaking importance. In the United States during this time, Tesla’s fame rivaled that of any other inventor or scientist in history or popular culture. Tesla demonstrated wireless energy transfer to power electronic devices as early as 1893, and aspired to intercontinental wireless transmission of industrial power in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project.

First image taken by Yue Wen

Other images courtesy of en.wikipedia.org

I was born in a family dedicated to aerospace technology. My grandfather is an aerospace electronics expert and my parents are also aerospace researchers. So when I was a child, I could always hear the stories of space shuttle, Apollo aircrafts, and satellites told by my parents, and also I went to their experimental fields to see some machines. I was very curious on how those big machines created and worked. At that time, my goal is to be an aerospace engineer, who makes it possible to let people see what is in the space.

I enjoyed every process I did in realizing my dream. At first, I started making elastic powered aircrafts and the motor-driven helicopters. Though making process was not as easy as I read in the book, I felt the happiness of making things by myself. Later, I made real rockets, and I was very happy and proud when I lit the fuse of my rocket on the playground and watched it flying more than twenty meters high. Even though mine was not rockets with two or three levels, or with a big controller, those things introduced me more and strengthened my goal.

So why in university would I choose Electrical Engineering as my major instead of Aerospace Engineering?
I did something related to electronics in high school, which changed my decision. With my increasing knowledge in physics, I begin to do more hands-on practices using electronics. My grandfather and I once designed a circuit and assembled a high quality audio power amplifier which can be used to a mechanism structure. Later, I made an ultra-sonic distance measuring device which would be applied on a great sensor on airplane or speedboat. In this process, I gradually understand how important knowledge in EE is in whatever engineering programs.

EE indeed plays a very important role in aerospace engineering, even though the later one is mainly concerned with the design, construction of aircraft and spacecraft. When we design an aircraft, we have need to set different sensors on it, which could give us a bunch of data of what the altitude is stays, what velocity it is at, etc. In all the sensors and controllers even the data analysis, we need control systems and signal processing which are all made of integrated circuits. During the flight, we also need telecommunications to communicate, which is one field in EE, too.

Hence, I choose EE as my major, but I believe I will contribute my real career time to aerospace field. In the process of pursuing professional knowledge, I am not sure what will happen and what I will do, but finally, I am sure that I will go back to China and work on exploration to the outer space. When that time comes, I could realize what I had dreamed about when I was little.

Image courtesy of elec-intro.com & chem.hawaii.edu

This link points you to our project’s glog contains video, images, ideas, etc.

http://syw784.glogster.com/s1/

Since no one in our group has ever talked about the details of our invention mob, I will write some important process in the whole activity which we did not say on the class. Although to create a collaborative art is a simple idea, still, it needs us to do a lot of work. Last Tuesday, we set up our creating site on the way to the student center where many students will walk around.

At first, I thought we could finish it quickly, since people should be interested in our big white canvas and pieces of shapes lied on the big stone. But in fact, it’s hard to call people to participate, cause student are not willing to spend their precious time while they were heading to the class, even though we provided them cookies. Most of time, they thought we want to sell them things. Later, I find one thing that, as long as I call more people to stand in front of our site, the more passer-byers would come and join us. So I tried to ask students who came in two or three to help us finish the canvas. Once a while, our project got more smoothly.

About the contents in the canvas, we cannot say what the whole picture looks like, Sheng said it looks like a tiger, but my roommate said it looks like a face. After looking the video we took, I can say every student who participated in our project tried to connect all the sheets already in the canvas made by the people pasted before. But everyone has their own perspective, so the canvas derived from making sense to not making sense. One reason for this is that maybe we provided so many sheets that ruin the whole looking.

We also created a website, and a video to show our process, and on the presentation, we will let more visitors to get involved in this ‘connected art’. And we made a poster, although in this part, I made a poster which is colorful and with rich content, but our group members like simple and unified style. So our poster may not attract people when you see it first, but it just suits our theme and our art style-several sheets and one canvas.

Anyway, this is a project involved creativity and collaborative, which brought people with different majors, different thoughts to one platform.

Right now our project still untitled, for it’s hard to make a brilliant name for this project.