I need a source about the history of algebraic graph theory. I mean for solving which problems or responding to what needs it was created?


Indeed, I want to write a note about the history of the birth of it. Can anybody help me?


Bests.



History of algebraic graph theory
A few comments about the history of algebraic graph theory: 


(1) Some early work was due to [William Tutte](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._T._Tutte) related to the four-color conjecture. The Tutte polynomial (and thus the chromatic polynomial) come out of his work. 


(2) A very brief comment about the history appears in the [first chapter](http://www.math.ucsd.edu/~fan/research/cb/ch1.pdf) of Fan Chung's Spectral Graph Theory. Early research by people like Allen Schwenk & Norman Biggs displayed the power of the linear algebra of graph adjacency matrices.


(3) I ran into Dale Mesner at a conference long ago -- he was very friendly and supportive of young researchers. The [Bose-Mesner](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bose%E2%80%93Mesner_algebra) algebra dates from the 1950s. It was very effective in ruling out certain configurations (including distance regular & strongly regular graphs) and could also be used to narrow down a search for such objects.


