Edith Clarke

Electrical engineer, born in Howard Co, Maryland, USA. Using her inheritance to attend Vassar, she went on to study engineering at the University of Wisconsin, worked for American Telephone and Telegraph (1912–18), and became the first woman to receive an MS in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1919). She then worked at General Electric (1922–45), focusing on large electrical power systems, and developed a calculating device that predicted the electrical behaviour of these systems. She postponed her retirement to a farm in Maryland by teaching at the University of Texas at Austin (1947–56).

Edith Clarke (10 February 1883 - 29 October 1959) was an electrical engineer and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She was the first woman employed as an electrical engineer in the United States, as well as the country's first female professor of electrical engineering. She then spent some time studying civil engineering at the University of Wisconsin, but left to become a "computer" at AT&T in 1912. While at AT&T, she studied electrical engineering at Columbia University by night.

In 1918, Clarke enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the following year she became the first woman to earn an M.S. in electrical engineering from MIT. Instead, she went to work for General Electric as a supervisor of computers in the Turbine Engineering Department.

In 1921, still unable to obtain a position as an engineer, she left GE to teach physics at the Constantinople Women's College in Turkey. The next year, GE finally became aware of her value and re-hired her as an engineer in the Central Station Engineering Department.

Unlike many of her colleagues of the time, Clarke was well versed in higher mathematics and aware of its importance to electrical engineering, particularly to the increasing complexity and interconnectedness of power systems. In 1926, as the first woman to deliver a paper at the American Institute of Electrical Engineers' annual meeting, she showed the use of hyperbolic functions for calculating the maximum power that a line could carry without instability. In 1947, she joined the faculty of the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

In 1948, Clarke was the first female Fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.