Institute of Radio Engineers - Merger

Merger

Until the early 1940s IRE was a relatively small engineering organization, but the growing importance of electrical communications and the emergence of the discipline of electronics in the 1940s have increased its appeal to practitioners. Students of electrical engineering and young electrical engineers favored IRE over its older rival, the AIEE, and in 1957 IRE (with 57,000 members) was the larger organization. Negotiations about merging the two organizations started that year and continued until a new joint organization, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) was established in 1963. Several new professional organizations (such as the Society of Broadcast Engineers, SBE) were founded shortly thereafter by IRE and AIEE members who opposed the merger.

The first president of IRE was Robert H. Marriott, chief engineer of the Wireless Company of America. Other notable presidents of the IRE included Irving Langmuir (1923), John H. Morecroft (1924), Lee deForest (1930), Frederick E. Terman (1941), William R. Hewlett (1954), Ernst Weber (1959; also first president of IEEE, 1963) and Patrick E. Haggerty (1962).