IEEE Edison Medal

Introduction

The Edison Medal signals benchmark events driving and giving shape to the history of the modern electrical world. It is the United States’ and Canada’s highest and oldest award for innovators in electronic and electrical engineering, and the IEEE’s “principal medal” (which is only second in prestige to the IEEE’s Medal of Honor). The Edison Medal bears the name of an inventor and engineer reverently dubbed “The Wizard” by his contemporaries; a man who was routinely and ubiquitously hailed a genius; the man who invented the technology that would electrify the dark with the Edison incandescent light bulb in 1879; this same man also and with made it possible to bring the music of an entire orchestra or world renowned singer into family living rooms with the phonograph; that man is Thomas A. Edison. The architects of the Edison Medal honored Thomas Edison, who is widely regarded as the United States’ best known inventor, they stated, by offering an “incentive to [electrical] scientists, [electrical] engineers and [electrical] artisans to maintain by their works the high standard of accomplishment set by the illustrious man whose name and features shall live while human intelligence inhabits the world… .”

A Changing Purpose

Like the technologies to which the Edison Medal pays homage, the award’s purpose evolved with time. Originally, the medal recognized meritorious student accomplishments at the college and university level in order to inspire, motivate, and support young people in building on Edison’s pathbreaking work. The award’s pool of potential recipients changed when, in 1908 – four years after the medal’s founding – no qualified candidates applied for the award. Under the revised rules, The Edison Medal acknowledges a much more seasoned generation’s “lifetime achievement” rather than the budding genius of aspiring inventors of electronic and electrical technology. In 1910, Dr. Elihu Thomson – who had patented approximately seven hundred technologies – became the Edison Medal’s first conferee. Controversies But the Edison Medal was not only emblematic of feats in engineering; occasionally it functioned as a lightning rod of controversy among innovators in the field. A decades long debate on the merits, or lack thereof, of alternating current systems – a very public argument in where Edison’s harsh criticism of the technology was widely reported – led one medal recipient to ignore the award’s namesake in his acceptance speech and another to reject the award altogether (the latter subsequently changed his mind and chose to accept the medal after extensive verbal wrangling with friends, who were also colleagues in engineering). Edison’s opposition to some of his colleagues’ work, however, did not bar the Edison Medal’s bestowers from recognizing their achievements, nor did it stop most of those who vehemently disagreed with Edison from accepting the award. In fact, the majority of Edison Medal awards went to the creators and proponents of alternating current technologies – men such as George Westinghouse and Michael Pupin, for example, who accepted the medal in 1910 and 1920 respectively.

Conclusion: Honoring Historic Firsts

Overtime, controversies linked to the Edison Medal dissipated while, thankfully, demonstrations of human ingenuity in the engineering field have persisted. The Edison Medal has been used to honor and recognize numerous historically significant firsts. In so doing, Esther M. Conwell herself became an Edison Medal first – in 1997, she was the awards first woman recipient. Conwell’s accomplishments provide evidence of the evolution of electronic and electrical technologies and also the field of electronic and electrical engineering. The Edison Medal has marked – and continues to mark – the tremendous importance and complexity of modern electrical history.