Edith Clarke

Edith Clarke (1883 to 1959) was an American electrical engineer and academic who specialized in electrical power system analysis and is credited with laying the foundation for the smart grid. Born in Howard County, Maryland, she studied mathematics and astronomy at Vassar, worked as a human computer at AT&T, and in 1919 became the first woman to earn a master's degree in electrical engineering at MIT. At General Electric she invented the Clarke calculator, a graphical device patented in 1925 that solved line equations with hyperbolic functions ten times faster than earlier methods, and in 1922 she became the first professional female electrical engineer in the United States. Her 1926 paper showed how to calculate the maximum power a long line could carry without instability, which mattered as transmission lines grew longer, and she worked on the electrical design of western hydroelectric dams including Hoover Dam. Her two-volume textbook Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems, which taught symmetrical components, educated power engineers for decades, and in 1947 she became the first female professor of electrical engineering in the country, at the University of Texas at Austin.