Edith Clarke was born in 1883 in a small farming community in Maryland as one of nine children. Unfortunately by age 12 she was an orphan. However, despite living in a time when it was almost unheard of for a woman to acquire a college degree, she was able to use her small inheritance to enroll in Vassar College at age 18. She studied mathematics and astronomy, and graduated in 1908 with Phi Beta Kappa honors.
After college, Clarke taught mathematics and physics at a private girls' school in San Francisco and then at Marshall College in West Virginia. "Wanting to be an engineer, however, Clarke enrolled in the civil engineering program at the University of Wisconsin in 1911. A summer job as a mathematical computing assistant at AT&T changed those plans, though, as she decided to remain full-time at AT&T... Clarke eventually became the manager of a group of women 'computers' who made calculations for the Transmission and Protection Engineering Department during World War I. During that time she also studied radio at Hunter College and electrical engineering at Columbia University". (www.agnesscott.edu)
In 1918, Clarke left AT&T to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in their EE program, and in 1919 became the first woman to earn her master's degree in electrical engineering from MIT. Upon graduation, however, she found the the opportunities for women in the engineering field to be very limited, so she went to work as a "computer" again, this time for General Electric (http://msa.maryland.gov).
During this time, she filed a patent application describing her invention of a graphical calculator to be used in the solution of electric power transmission problems. In 1921, frustrated with her inability to obtain a position as an engineer at GE and wishing to see more of the world, she left GE to teach physics at the Constantinople Women's College in Turkey. But then in 1922 she was re-hired by GE as an officially recognized salaried electrical engineer in the Central Station Engineering Department, making her the first professionally employed female electrical engineer in the United States.
She worked at GE for 26 years until 1945, at which point she retired to join the electrical engineering faculty at the University of Texas-Austin. This made her (you guessed it!) the first female professor of Electrical Engineering in the country. She retired from teaching in 1956, and Edith Clarke died in October 1959 at the age of 76.
Additional accomplishments among her long list of "firsts" include being the first woman to present a paper before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (later to become IEEE) in 1926. Her paper had critical national importance, as she applied a mathematical technique called the method of symmetrical components to model a large power system and its behavior. (http://www.edisontechcenter.org)
Additionally, she became the first woman to be elected a fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1948, and then, in 1954, she received a lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Women Engineers "in recognition of her many original contributions to stability theory and circuit analysis." (http://www.engineergirl.org) Her two volume work, Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems, was published in 1943 and 1950. Edith Clarke was also the first female engineer to achieve professional standing in Tau Beta Pi. In 2015, Clarke was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
After that exhausting list of "firsts", I'll leave you with an Edith Clarke quote:
"There is no demand for women engineers, as such, as there are for women doctors; but there's always a demand for anyone who can do a good piece of work."
As always, if you have suggestions for future "Throwback Thursday" women, you can email hadmeathelloworld@gmail.com, comment below, or comment on the Facebook page!
References:
http://www.edisontechcenter.org/Clarke.html
http://www.engineergirl.org/Engineers/HistoricalEngineers/4399.aspx
http://ethw.org/Edith_Clarke
http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/educ/exhibits/womenshall/html/clarke.html
https://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/clarke.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edith_Clarke
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