Edith Clarke was born on February 10, 1883 in Howard County, Maryland. At the age of eighteen, she received a small inheritance and went to Vassar College, and concentrated on mathematics and astronomy. She graduated in 1908 with honors and a Phi Beta Kappa key. She taught math, but became disillusioned with it. In 1911, after a serious illness, she decided to return to school and study engineering.. She enrolled at the University of Wisconsin, and worked during the summers for AT&T in New York. She was hired as a computor, or someone who solves mathematical equations.

Ms. Clarke left New York to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and earned her masters in electrical engineering, the first woman to earn a degree in that field from MIT. Ms. Clarke found opportunities for women in the engineering field very limited, so she went to work as a computor again, this time for General Electric. She filed a patent application describing her invention of a graphical calculator to be used in the solution of electric transmission.

She taught physics for a year at Constantinople Women’s College in Turkey. Upon her return to New York, Ms. Clarke finally achieved her life-long goal–to work as an engineer for the Central Station Engineering Department of General Electric. This made her the first professionally employed female electrical engineer in the United States, and was the first woman to be accepted as a full member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE. She retired in 1945, and became Fellow of AIEE in 1948; the first woman so honored.

Ms. Clarke authored or co-authored nineteen technical papers between 1923 and 1951. She was the first woman to present an AIEE paper. In 1941, she and a colleague were awarded “best paper of the year.” Additionally, Ms. Clarke authored a two-volume reference textbook, Circuit Analysis of A. C. Systems.

In 1947 she became a full professor at the University of Texas, in Austin,, the first woman to teach in the engineering department at the University of Texas. She retired for a second time in 1956, when she returned to her farm in Howard County. Ms. Clarke received the Society of Women Engineer’s Achievement Award in 1954, and was selected for inclusion in Women of Achievement in Maryland History in 1998. Ms. Clarke was also included in American National Biography and Notable American Women of the Modern Period. Ms. Clarke died in 1959 at the age of seventy-six.

Dr. James E. Brittain,”From Computer to Electrical Engineer – Edith Clarke,” explains…”Edith Clarke’s engineering career had as its central theme the development and dissemination of mathematical methods that tended to simplify and reduce the time spent in laborious calculations in solving problems in the design and operation of electrical power systems. She translated what many engineers found to be esoteric mathematical methods into graphs or simpler forms during a time when power systems were becoming more complex and when the initial efforts were being made to develop electromechanical aids to problem solving. As a woman who worked in an environment traditionally dominated by men, she demonstrated effectively that women could perform at least as well as men if given the opportunity. Her outstanding achievements provided an inspiring example for the next generation of women with aspirations to become career engineers.”

SOURCE Maryland Commission for Women, 2003; Edison Texh Center