Edward G. Ramberg was born in Florence, Italy in 1907. He and his family emigrated from Italy to Munich until the end of World War I. In 1920 the family moved to his mother's family home in Portland, Oregon. In 1922 he enrolled in Reed College, but transferred to Cornell University in 1924. Following a hiatus working at Bausch and Lomb on optical computing, for two years, Ramberg finished his bachelor's degree at Cornell in 1928, and in 1930 he studied at the Ludwig Maximilions University where he received his Ph.D. in 1932. During World War II, being Quaker, he did alternative services, rather than fight in the war.

Ramberg began his employment at RCA in 1935 where he was assigned experimental work on secondary emission, pickup tubes and field electron emission. Later, he assisted in the development of the theory of thermoelectric refrigeration, vacuum tube aberrations, and a multistage electrostatic electron multiplier. He helped to construct one of the first electron microscopes in the 1940s.

As a teacher, Ramberg was a lecturer at the University of Munich in 1949, and a Fulbright lecturer at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt in 1960-1961. He coauthored a number of books, published many papers, and earned numerous awards for his work from the American Physical Society, RCA, the Society for Information Display, and the Institute of Radio Engineers.

Ramberg retired from RCA in 1972, and died in January 1995 at the age of 87.