Edith Clarke and power system stability

Abstract

Provides a brief biography of a pioneering woman in electrical engineering. In the fall of 1911, Edith Clarke enrolled in the civil engineering program at the University of Wisconsin, but left after a year to become a computing assistant to George A. Campbell at American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T). She learned a great deal about the theory of transmission lines and electrical circuits from Campbell before she enrolled in electrical engineering atMassachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1918. She earned an M.S. degree from MIT in 1919 and was the first woman to receive an electrical engineering degree at the school. From 1910-1921, Clarke worked for GE in Schenectady, where she trained and directed a small group of women computers doing calculations of mechanical stresses in turbine rotors. Despite her credentials, she did not enjoy the status or salary of an engineer at GE. In 1921, she filed a successful patent application on a graphical calculator to be used in solving transmission line problems, and it was the subject of her first technical paper published in the GE Review in 1923. She left GE in 1921 but returned in 1922. In February 1926, Clarke became the first woman to present an AIEE paper that was later published in the Transactions of the AIEE. Clarke retired from GE in 1945 and joined the electrical engineering faculty at the University of Texas in 1947, where she taught until 1956. In 1948, she became the first woman to be elected a Fellow of the AIEE. She retired to her native Maryland in 1956, where she died in 1959 at age 76. [This article originally appeared in "Scanning the Past" in the January 1996 issue of Proceedings of the IEEE.]