Milestones

Earth sciences professors set up the first string of seismographic stations in the Western hemisphere to track earthquake data.

The ten stations in the “California System,” which include sites at Chabot Observatory and Mills College in Oakland, use copies of the Ewing Duplex Pendulum seismograph constructed in San Francisco.

Julia Morgan, the only woman in her class, graduates with a degree in civil engineering.

While at Berkeley, Morgan finds a mentor in well-known California architect Bernard Maybeck, who teaches technical drawing to engineering students. When Morgan graduates she continues her studies at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. She is the first woman to study there. Morgan begins her career as an architect in San Francisco and goes on to design more than 700 buildings. In 2014, Morgan is posthumously awarded the Gold Medal from the American Institute of Architects in recognition of her influence on the profession.

Increasing energy efficiency and experimenting with emerging technologies become underpinning themes of the college’s research.

Berkeley engineers pioneer high-voltage power transmission technologies, which allow San Francisco and Los Angeles to grow by harnessing hydroelectric power from the Sierra Nevada. Berkeley engineers also develop electric vehicles that can travel 100 miles per charge.

Rube Goldberg graduates from the College of Mining. Goldberg brings engineering concepts and humor to a nationwide audience through his syndicated newspaper cartoons depicting characters using elaborately complicated machines to complete simple tasks.

Goldberg’s drawings earn him numerous awards, but it is the decidedly sober subject of the atom bomb that earns him the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for editorial cartooning. Today, in honor of his ridiculously complicated contraptions, engineering students across the country compete every year in Rube Goldberg machine-building competitions.

The year’s graduating class from the College of Mechanics.

The all-male class photo includes several professors and, front row center, Dean Clarence L. Cory.

The newly completed Hesse Hall houses the growing college. The building provides space for a motor, generator, radio labs and test rooms.

Hesse Hall is named after Friedrich G. Hesse, who was appointed the first engineering faculty member in 1875. Hesse also served as the first Dean of the College of Mechanics in 1896.

The college plays an important role in the World War II effort, even as male enrollment drops more than 50 percent under the pressures of military enlistment.

As part of the federal Engineering Defense Training program, Berkeley’s Department of Mechanical Engineering lays the groundwork for large-scale industrial training programs in the San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco areas. By the time the war ends in 1945, more than 150,000 men and women are trained for industrial occupations by the university.

Berkeley’s first building to be built in the Modernist style is designed to house the growing electrical engineering department.

The building, named for Clarence L. Cory, dean of the College of Mechanics and a faculty member for almost 40 years, houses a state-of-the-art electronic micro-fabrication facility and labs devoted to integrated circuits, lasers, and robotics. The fifth floor was added in 1985, with an exterior featuring a computer chip-inspired design motif.

Efficiency in naval architecture research.

Using everything from wind tunnels and handmade wooden ship models to life-size testing on San Francisco Bay, Berkeley’s naval architecture program — one of only four accredited degree programs in the nation — is led by professor John V. Wehausen, a pioneer in the field of marine hydrodynamics.

During the late 1950s, Berkeley engineers begin biomechanical and prosthetic research. Advances in devices and technology translate into improving the quality of life for end users.

Chuck Radcliffe receives his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Berkeley. He becomes a faculty member and principal investigator in the Prosthetics Research Group of the Biomechanics Laboratory for the next 35 years. His major projects are the study of human locomotion and improved prosthetic limb design. He makes pioneering contributions to the quadrilateral socket, patellar-tendon-bearing (PTB) prosthesis, solid ankle cushion heel (SACH) foot and the four-bar prosthetic knee. He is credited with providing the fundamental principles of the biomechanics of prosthetic alignment and socket force transfer throughout the amputee gait cycle. He publishes numerous papers on mechanism design, especially as applied to prosthetic devices, and is often lauded as the father of prosthetic biomechanics.

Early research in microelectronics sets the stage for the future growth of the computer and electronic technology industries that become part of California’s economy and identity.

The microelectronics industry that is now vital to California’s economy got its start on the Berkeley and Stanford campuses. Working at the controls in this early Berkeley microelectronics lab (circa 1960) is graduate student David A. Hodges, who later becomes a dean. Labs like this were precursors to the university’s $4 million microfabrication facility, which, when it opens in 1985, becomes the first of its kind on a university campus.

Etcheverry Hall opens, housing the departments of mechanical engineering, nuclear engineering and industrial engineering and operations research.

Etcheverry, the first UC-built building on the north side of Hearst Ave., was named for Bernard Etcheverry, professor of drainage and irrigation. It once held a functioning nuclear reactor in its basement and a research wind tunnel, both now dismantled.

UNIX, a computer operating system used worldwide and foundational to the modern internet, is created by two friends who wanted to play a computer game.

Berkeley electrical engineering graduate student Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, a scientist at Bell Laboratories, want to play the computer game “Space Travel” on a dusty old mainframe computer. To do it, the two write a new operating system for the machines. The end result is UNIX, still the industry standard operating system, in various flavors, for workstation and networked computing, and a key component in the internet’s infrastructure. (Peter Hamer photo, via Wikimedia Commons)

A team led by EECS professor Donald Pederson develops the Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis (SPICE) — a tool that, along with its derivatives, has been used in the design of almost every integrated circuit since its invention.

SPICE inspired and served as a basis for many other circuit simulation programs in academia, industry and commercial products. Part of the reason for its success is that, in keeping with Berkeley’s core values, it was an early public domain software program with source code available.

Graduate student Bill Joy develops Berkeley UNIX and the Berkeley Software Distribution System.

EECS graduate student Bill Joy releases Berkeley UNIX using the name Berkeley Software Distribution. The software is available to anyone who wants it and marks the beginning of the open source movement. (Photo courtesy Sun Microsystems)

Construction is completed on the Bechtel Engineering Center, located in the heart of the engineering section of campus.

The building houses the Kresge Library, Sibley Auditorium and the Garbarini Lounge. Today the building is also the headquarters for Engineering Student Services and the Center for Access to Engineering Excellence. The Bechtel Engineering Center is named for benefactor Stephen D. Bechtel. He attended Berkeley Engineering for one year following his service in World War I and before going to work for — and eventually running — Bechtel Corporation, which was started by his father and has since grown into one of the largest construction and civil engineering firms in the country.

The city of Berkeley goes nuclear free, forcing the closure of the research reactor in Etcheverry Hall.

Voters in the city of Berkeley pass the Nuclear Free Berkeley Act, allowing fines for nuclear weapons-related activity. Although the state university is not subject to municipal ordinances, the nuclear engineering department eventually decommissions and dismantles its research reactor in the basement of Etcheverry.

Chang-Lin Tien, a longtime member of the mechanical engineering faculty, becomes chancellor of Berkeley.

Tien, who steered the campus through severe budget storms in the 1990s, was also a talented, tireless teacher and a favorite with students. He was an outspoken supporter of equal opportunity in higher education, and was the first Asian American to head a major U.S. research university.

Professor Tom Budinger is the founding chair for Berkeley’s brand-new Department of Bioengineering.

The first new department established by the college in over 40 years, bioengineering brings together the fields of engineering, biology and medicine to harness faculty expertise in synthetic biology, biomaterials, stem cell engineering and more. The department operates joint Ph.D and Master of Translational Medicine programs with UCSF.

The new Stanley Hall opens, home to the bioengineering department’s labs, offices and classrooms.

The building, which also houses the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences (QB3), serves as a hub for interdisciplinary research in math, chemistry, physics and biology, as well as engineering.

Sutardja Dai Hall opens and becomes the home for the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society.

Sutardja Dai Hall becomes the new home of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS) and the Banatao Institute @ CITRIS Berkeley. CITRIS combines the skills and talents of more than 300 faculty researchers and thousands of students from four UC campuses with industrial partners from more than 60 corporations.

Austin Whitney and the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory make history at Berkeley’s commencement ceremony.

Austin Whitney and the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory, led by mechanical engineer Homayoon Kazerooni, garner national attention after Whitney walks during his Berkeley commencement ceremony using a bionic exoskeleton. Whitney, who is unable to use his legs, worked with a team of Berkeley engineers to get the exoskeleton prototype operational.

Paul Jacobs, EECS alumnus and executive chairman of Qualcomm Inc., takes the stage of the Clinton Global Initiative in June to announce he is donating $20 million to the university to build the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation.

The new institute provides space and faculty and staff resources to better incorporate design thinking into the engineering curriculum. In studios and workspaces, students learn about and build devices and systems with rapid prototyping and manufacturing technologies. New academic programs, such as a minor in design, will also be part of the institute’s evolution. A new building, Jacobs Hall (opened in 2015), houses the Jacobs Institute.

Girls in Engineering launches its first summer program for middle school girls. The program is designed to inspire future engineering leaders by exposing participants to hands-on, team-based projects while emphasizing leadership and engineering in a societal context.

Girls in Engineering is envisioned as one part of the solution to closing the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Taught by female faculty, staff and students, the program promotes leadership skills and inspires confidence in the participants to pursue STEM fields.

A new center focusing on AI and human interactions opens.

Led by EECS professor and artificial intelligence (AI) expert Stuart Russell, the new center opens with a focus on making sure that future AI systems — especially the more complex systems that might control critical infrastructure, or provide people-oriented services — act in a manner that reflects positive human values. EECS professors Pieter Abbeel and Anca Dragan are also co-principal investigators of the new center, which is a collaborative effort across multiple universities.