Archive and History of The Pulse of Long Island

Pulse History

The Pulse of Long Island is the newsletter of the IEEE Long Island Section and is published monthly except for July and August. It is only available online, print editions have been discontinued. For details about the publishing schedule and advertising rates, please contact the Pulse Editor.

Pulse editions prior to 1963 make reference to the IRE, instead of the IEEE. The IEEE was formed in 1963 by the merger of the Institute of Radio Engineers (IRE, founded 1912) and the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE, founded 1884). The major interests of the AIEE were wire communications (telegraph and telephony) and light & power systems. The IRE concerned mostly radio engineering. With the rise of electronics in the 1930s, electronics engineers usually became members of the IRE, but the applications of electron tube technology became so extensive that the technical boundaries differentiating the IRE and the AIEE became difficult to distinguish. In the 1940s and 1950s, the two organizations became increasingly
competitive, and in 1961, the leadership of both the IRE and the AIEE resolved to consolidate the two organizations. The two organizations formally merged as the IEEE on January 1, 1963.

The first Pulse edition was published in September of 1952. Prior to this date, members were informed of news and upcoming events with postcard mailings.


Pulse Archive

We are missing a considerable number of Pulse editions from the earlier years, especially in the period between 1980 and 2000. If you have an issue of Pulse not currently available in the archive and would like to make it available in our archive, please email the scanned copy to the Editor at pulse@ieee.li. If possible, please scan the copy at 300 dpi minimum – thank you. Alternatively, please take images with your phone and email them, and we will do our best to convert that to a format appropriate for archiving.