Background
Clark was born on March 10, 1822, in Great Marlow, England, the younger brother to Edwin Clark.
electrician engineer scientist
Clark was born on March 10, 1822, in Great Marlow, England, the younger brother to Edwin Clark.
Almost nothing is known of Clark's education, except that he studied chemistry at school.
With early experience as a chemist, Clark joined his brother Edwin first as a civil engineer and then, in 1850, as an assistant engineer in a telegraph company. From that time on, his major interest was electricity, especially submarine telegraphy.
He exhibited an extreme bent for practicality, perhaps best illustrated by a letter to the editor of Engineer in 1885 that argued that a separate set of easily remembered symbols should be established for working electricians, using the initial letters of volt, ampere, ohm for voltage, current, resistance, and so on. He was instrumental in the founding of the Society of Telegraphic Engineers and Electricians (later the Institute of Electrical Engineers) and was its fourth president.
Clark’s interest in practical telegraphic matters led him into investigations of some scientific importance. In 1863 he demonstrated that the speed of a current pulse was independent of the voltage applied. A decade earlier he had shown that the retardation effects in telegraph cables were caused by induction; this information was then expanded upon by Faraday (Experimental Researches, III, 508-517). Clark developed a zinc-mercury standard cell that was widely used for both technological and scientific purposes.
In 1861 he and Charles Bright presented a paper to the British Association suggesting the establishment of standard electrical units; their reasoning, again, was highly practical. This led to the formation of the important Committee on Standards, on which Clark served until it was temporarily disbanded in 1870.
Clark had a strong avocational interest in astronomy; in 1857 he helped Airy, the astronomer royal, develop a telegraphic system for reporting Greenwich mean time throughout the country.
In 1854 Clark married Margaret Helen Preece, and divorced in 1861. They had two children.