Edith Clarke

Edith Clarke ( born February 10, 1883 Howard County, Maryland, † October 29, 1959 in Maryland ) was the first woman in the U.S. engineer for electrical engineering, first female member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers ( AIEE ) and Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. According to her, the Clarke transformation used in the three-phase technology is named.

She studied mathematics and astronomy at Vassar College in 1908 and earned her Bachelor of Arts. After she briefly taught mathematics and physics at a private school in San Francisco and at Marshall College, she started a course in civil engineering. In 1912 she began but as a human computer at AT & T under George Ashley Campbell. Meanwhile, she studied electrical engineering at Columbia University at night. In 1918 she moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned the following year master's degree in electrical engineering. Since they are not hired as an engineer, she began at General Electric, where she oversaw the Computer Engineering Department of the turbine. In her spare time, she developed the Clarke calculator, a graphical tool with which you could solve equations for high voltage power transmission including hyperbolic functions ten times faster than with previous methods. In September 1925 she received on the patent US1552113.

Because they still do not want to deal as an engineer, she left General Electric and became a professor of physics at Constantinople Women's College in Turkey. The following year, General Electric was aware of its value and hired her as an engineer at the Central Station Engineering Department.

Unlike many of her colleagues, she was well versed in higher mathematics that became more important in the electricity interconnection in the form of mesh networks and the increasing complexity in interconnected networks.

In 1945, she announced at General Electric and began two years later at the Electrical Engineering Department of the University of Texas, where she taught for ten years.