Sandy Brehl's Reviews > The Brilliant Calculator: How Mathematician Edith Clarke Helped Electrify America

Edith Clarke (also with an /e/ to end her surname), excelled at academic tasks, puzzle-solving, and dreaming of building railroads, bridges, and dams. She was sent to boarding school to learn manners and grace, but dismissed that frustratingly unchallenging curriculum during the same era as Josephine was inventing- the turn of the twentieth century. Potential career paths in engineering of any kind led Edith to closed and locked doors, but she used her inheritance to hire private tutors in languages, math, science, and to study the emerging wave of technology. Employed to manage mundane tasks within the burgeoning telephone industry, Edith became aware of operational weaknesses and evaluated ways to address those. That involved complex analytical computations; ones she was able to complete but few others could. Instead, she devised and carefully constructed a simple rotating, two-armed cardboard tool that would allow others to determine precise and necessary answers to a myriad of equations. A calculator!

In the field of electrical engineering, Edith Clarke is a less familiar name than most, but she stands as equal to Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and Morgan in the measure of the contributions she made through her work. Back matter includes a detailed timeline and some archival photos, as well as brief notes about other notable women in math and engineering.