Edith Clarke

Edith Clarke was a trailblazing electrical engineer who was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015. Orphaned when she was 12, Clarke never expected to go to college but decided to use her inheritance for that purpose. Once she had her master’s in electrical engineering, Clarke had great difficulty finding a job as an engineer—because of her gender. Through a number of jobs including some as a “computer,” she persisted and finally was hired—as an engineer—by General Electric. Clarke’s patent for a graphical calculator with applications for the electric utility grid greatly simplified calculations for energy storage and dissipation in long electrical transmission lines. Her two-volume textbook on circuit analysis of AC power systems was the standard college textbook for years for power engineers. Clarke had a number of firsts including the first woman to earn a master’s degree in electrical engineering from MIT, one of the first three fellows of the predecessor organization to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and the first female professor of electrical engineering in the United States. The chapter also provides a discussion of the so-called current war of alternating current (AC) versus direct current (AC) whose primary advocates were Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, respectively.