Edith Clarke

Edith Clarke died on October 29, 1959, at the age of 76.

Edith Clarke was born on February 10, 1883, in Maryland as one of nine children in a prosperous family. She received an upbringing typical for girls of her stature where the emphasis was on grooming the young women for marriage and motherhood.

She went to Briarley Hall, a boarding school for girls in Montgomery County where she learned Latin, English literature, and history. She also received rigorous training in arithmetic, algebra, and geometry which laid the foundation of her future career.

Orphaned at a young age, she used her inheritance to fund her education at Vassar College where she studied mathematics and astronomy and graduated in 1908 with Phi Beta Kappa honors.

Edith Clarke embarked on a teaching career and she taught mathematics at a private girls' school in San Francisco for some time before moving on to Marshall College in Huntington. As a teacher she realized that her true passion was engineering and decided to get a formal education in the field.

In 1911, she studied civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for a while. At the end of her first year, she took a job as a "Computer Assistant" to AT&T research engineer Dr. George Campbell who applied mathematical methods to the problems of long-distance electrical transmissions.

Along with her job, she attended night classes in electrical engineering at Columbia University. She enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1918, and the following year she became the first woman to earn an M.S. in electrical engineering from the institute.

She began looking for a job as an engineer but was unable to find one as employers were reluctant to employ a female engineer. So she accepted a position as a supervisor of computers in the Turbine Engineering Department in GE. There she trained and supervised women who calculated the mechanical stresses in turbines.

In her spare time she worked on her inventions and created the Clarke calculator, a simple graphical device that solved equations involving electric current, voltage and impedance in power transmission lines.

She invented the Clarke calculator for which she got a patent in 1925. The simple graphical device could solve equations involving electric current, voltage and impedance in power transmission lines. It was a very speedy device that could solve line equations involving hyperbolic functions ten times faster than previous methods.