Edith Clarke
Orphaned at 12, she became the first woman electrical engineer in America after a detour to Turkey
Edith Clarke was born in Maryland in 1883, one of nine children, and was orphaned at twelve. She used her small inheritance to study mathematics and astronomy at Vassar, then taught school, and at 28 enrolled in civil engineering at Wisconsin. She left to work as a human computer at AT&T, calculating by hand for the engineers, and in 1919 became the first woman to receive a master\'s degree in electrical engineering from MIT.
No one would hire her as an engineer. General Electric took her on to supervise a room of women calculating stresses in turbines. She did engineering work in her spare time, and in 1921 filed a patent for a slide-rule-like device that solved the equations of long power transmission lines ten times faster than before. That same year, tired of lower pay and status than the men beside her, she went to teach physics at a women\'s college in Constantinople.
When she returned in 1922 GE hired her as an engineer, the first woman in the United States employed as one. In 1926 she became the first woman to present a paper to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, on the stability of long lines. Her two-volume textbook on power systems became a standard.
She retired from GE in 1945 and in 1947 became the first woman professor of electrical engineering in the country, at the University of Texas. She died in 1959.