He received the IEEE Edison Medal for "outstanding and inspiring leadership in engineering education and in the field of generation and distribution of electric power".

His younger brother, John Price Jackson, co-wrote some books with him and also had a career as an electrical engineer, academic, civil servant and soldier.

He attended The Hill School in Pottstown before studying civil engineering at Pennsylvania State College from which he graduated in 1885.

[3] Jackson established research as a part of engineering education at MIT and coordinated it with practical experience in industrial settings (for example, with the General Electric Company), and his model spread widely.

The conference was organized by the Boston Edison Company and Jackson promised the support of the Department of Electrical Engineering of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in providing scientific research to support the development of the electric vehicle industry.