Edith Clarke

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Edith Clarke (* 10. February 1883 in Howard County , Maryland ; † 29. October 1959 in Maryland) was the first woman in the US Engineer for Electrical Engineering , the first female member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) and Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin . The Clarke transformation used in three-phase AC technology is named after her.

biography

She studied mathematics and astronomy at Vassar College and earned her Bachelor of Arts in 1908 . After briefly teaching math and physics at a private school in San Francisco and at Marshall College, she began studying civil engineering . In 1912, however, she began working 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 received her Masters in Electrical Engineering the following year . Not being hired as an engineer, however, she started at General Electric , overseeing the computers at the Turbine Engineering Department . In her spare time she developed the Clarke calculator , a graphical instrument with which one could solve equations for high voltage transmissions including hyperbolic functions ten times faster than with previous methods. In September 1925 she received the patent US1552113.

Still unwilling to employ her as an engineer, she left General Electric in 1921 and became a professor of physics at Constantinople Women's College in Turkey. The following year, General Electric realized her worth and hired her as an engineer at the Central Station Engineering Department .

In contrast to many of her colleagues, she was well versed in higher mathematics , which became more and more important with the interconnection of power grids in the form of mesh networks and the increasing complexity in interconnected networks .

Her work on the method of symmetrical components received an award from the AIEE in 1932 as the best publication of the year. Their method made it possible to run power plants more economically.

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

In 2015 she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jäger, Kurt / Heilbronner, Friedrich (ed.): Lexicon of electrical engineers. 2nd edition Berlin: VDE-Verl. 2010. p. 86