MEET OUR ROBOT

Edith

Meet Edith! We decided to uphold our theme of naming our robot after strong female engineers and role models in our lives. Edith Clark was the first female electrical engineer and the first female professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. She specialized in electrical power system analysis and wrote Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems. Subsequently, she taught mathematics at a private girls' school in San Francisco, and then at Marshall College in Huntington, WV. In the fall of 1911, Edith enrolled as a civil engineering student at the University of Wisconsin. At the end of her first year, she took a summer job as a "Computer Assistant" to AT&T research engineer Dr. George Campbell and was so interested in her work that she stayed on at AT&T to train and direct a group of (human) "computers."
In 1918, Edith enrolled in the EE program at MIT, earning her MSc. degree, the first such degree ever awarded by that department to a woman, in June 1919. She then took a job as a "computer" for General Electric in Schenectady, NY, and in 1921 filed a patent for a "graphical calculator" to be employed in solving electric power transmission line problems. In 1947 Clarke left GE after 26 years to teach electrical engineering at the University of Texas, Austin, where she became the first female EE professor in the US and worked there until retirement in 1956. She became the first woman to be elected a fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (which became the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, IEEE). In 1954, she received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Women Engineers. The Award cited her contributions to the field in the form of her simplifying charts and her work in system instability. Edith Clarke died five years later, on October 29, 1959, in Olney, Maryland.