Late, great engineers: Edith Clarke - America’s first woman engineer

Almost a century ago, on 9^th February 1926, the New York Times ran with a story headed ‘Woman Addresses Electrical Institute’. Drawing further attention to the significance of the occurrence described, the newspaper further explained: ‘Miss Edith Clarke the Only One of Her Sex to Read a Paper at Engineers’ Meeting.’ The first woman to be professionally employed as an electrical engineer in the United States was literally headline news.

In fact, the delivery of one of her numerous influential papers on electrical power systems was but one of many firsts in Clarke’s remarkable career. She was the first female professor of electrical engineering in the US, the first woman fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers as well as the first woman to be recognised by the oldest engineering ‘honor society’ in America, Tau Beta Pi. Her 1943 book Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems is a classic of its kind, occasionally cropping up on rare book collectors’ websites with a price tag of several hundred pounds. Today, perhaps Clarke’s best-known contribution to the world of engineering is her graphical calculator that greatly simplified the calculations necessary to determine the electrical characteristics of long electrical transmission lines, for which she was inducted posthumously to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2015.