19th century

However, it was not until the 19th century that research into the subject started to intensify. Notable developments in this century include the work of Georg Ohm, who in 1827 quantified the relationship between the electric current and potential difference in a conductor, Michael Faraday, the discoverer of electromagnetic induction in 1831, and James Clerk Maxwell, who in 1873 published a unified theory of electricity and magnetism in his treatise Electricity and Magnetism.^[3]
Beginning in the 1830s, efforts were made to apply electricity to practical use in the telegraph. By the end of the 19th century the world had been forever changed by the rapid communication made possible by engineering development of land-lines, submarine cables, and, from about 1890, wireless telegraphy.
Practical applications and advances in such fields created an increasing need for standardized units of measure. They led to the international standardization of the units volt, ampere, coulomb, ohm, farad, and henry. This was achieved at an international conference in Chicago 1893.^[4] The publication of these standards formed the basis of future advances in standardisation in various industries, and in many countries the definitions were immediately recognised in relevant legislation.^[5]

Thomas Edison built the world's first large-scale electrical supply network.

During these years, the study of electricity was largely considered to be a subfield of physics. It was not until about 1885 that universities and institutes of technology such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Cornell University started to offer bachelor's degrees in electrical engineering. The Darmstadt University of Technology founded the first department of electrical engineering in the world in 1882. In that same year, under Professor Charles Cross at MIT began offering the first option of electrical engineering within its physics department.^[6] In 1883, Darmstadt University of Technology and Cornell University introduced the world's first bachelor's degree courses of study in electrical engineering, and in 1885 the University College London founded the first chair of electrical engineering in Great Britain.^[7] The University of Missouri established the first department of electrical engineering in the United States in 1886.^[8] Several other schools soon followed suit, including Cornell and the Georgia School of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.
During these decades use of electrical engineering increased dramatically. In 1882, Thomas Edison switched on the world's first large-scale electric power network that provided 110 volts — direct current (DC) — to 59 customers on Manhattan Island in New York City. In 1884, Sir Charles Parsons invented the steam turbine. Turbines now provide the mechanical power for about 80 percent of the electric power in the world using a variety of heat sources. The alternating current power system developed rapidly after 1886 with efficient, practical, transformer and AC motor designs, including induction motors independently invented by Galileo Ferraris and Nikola Tesla and further developed into a practical three-phase form by Mikhail Dolivo-Dobrovolsky and Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown.^[9] AC had the ability to transmit power more efficiently over long distances via the use of transformers to increase and decrease voltages (not possible with DC). The spread in the use of AC set off what has been called the War of Currents between the backers of AC and DC based power systems, with AC being adopted as the overall standard.^[10]