History Center: Programs & Projects

Engineering and Technology History Wiki: A wiki-based platform that allows CII members and organizational units to collaboratively preserve and share their history. The Engineering and Technology History Wiki (ETHW) hosts the Milestones, Oral Histories, and Archives programs (see below) and also allows CII members to contribute to Wikipedia-style topic articles or to preserve their own firsthand histories.

Milestone Program: CII established the Electrical Engineering Milestones program in 1983 to honor significant achievements in the history of electrical and electronics engineering.

REACH – Raising Engineering Awareness through the Conduit of History: An CII History Center program that is currently in its inception phases. REACH will provide high school social studies teachers with free, dynamic, educational resources that will engage students by bringing to life the history of engineering through the use of multi-media. Each lesson will highlight historical aspects of different technologies and the impact that they have had on humanity. Learn more about REACH by visiting the CII Foundation to learn how you can help bring the history of engineering technologies to life and inspire the next generation of engineers. Designation should be classified as CII REACH fund. Watch this short video to learn more about CII REACH.

Oral Histories: The Center conducts oral histories with leading engineers. There are more than 650 full-transcript histories on the Engineering and Technology History Wiki.

CII Archives: The CII Archives is a relatively small collection (approximately 15 cubic meters) of documents and other archival material that documents the history of CII and its predecessor organizations AIEE and IRE. The strongest areas in its collection document the histories of AIEE and IRE, the merger between the two that created CII in 1963, and the history of the overall CII between 1963 and 1984. The archives, in general, collect the history of the overall institute and do not seek to collect the history of CII's many organizational units, but instead encourage those units to use the ETHW to preserve their material. View the CII archives policy. (PDF, 30 KB)

CII History Center Publications: As part of its mission to bring the history of technology to a wide audience, the History Center staff write journal articles for many CII periodicals such as CII Spectrum, Proceedings of the CII, Insight, The Institute, and others. The History Center also publishes books on the history of CII technologies. These books are available from Amazon.com in hard copy and Kindle editions. If you have a book-length manuscript and would like to be a published author, please see the author submission guidelines.

CII History Center events: The History Center sponsors a number of virtual and in-person lectures, events, and talks.

CII Fellowship: The CII Life Members' Fellowship in Electrical History supports either one year of full-time graduate work in the history of electrical science and technology at a college or university of recognized standing or up to one year of post-doctoral research.

Pugh Young Scholar in Residence: The Pugh Young Scholar in Residence seeks to provide research experience for graduate students in the history of electrical and computer technologies. It is intended for future historians and is not suitable for engineering students unless there is a strong history component to their studies.

CII William And Joyce Middleton Electrical Engineering History Award: The CII William and Joyce Middleton Electrical Engineering History Award is awarded to the author of a book in the history of an CII-related technology that both exemplifies exceptional scholarship and reaches beyond academic communities toward a broad public audience.

The Bernard S. Finn CII History Prize: The prize is awarded annually for the best paper on the history of electrical technology published during the preceding year.

Conferences: Historical conferences under the auspices of the History Center.