Ernst Weber: bridger of cultures

The accomplishments of Ernst Weber, who was born in 1901 in Vienna, are discussed. Weber earned doctorates in both physics and electrical engineering and worked as an engineer for Siemens-Schuckert before moving to the United States in 1930. For the next 27 years he taught and did research at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn. There he built up an outstanding graduate program and made important contributions to microwave research. In 1957 he became President of Polytechnic, and in 1963 he served as the first president of the newly formed Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). After his retirement in 1969 from Polytechnic, he worked nine years for the National Research Council. Throughout his career Weber worked to build bridges between different cultures: between European electrical engineering and American electrical engineering, between industry and academia, between engineering and physics, and between the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the Institute of Radio Engineers, when they merged to become the IEEE