Kate Gleason(1865 — 1933)
Kate Gleason
États-Unis
6 min read
Kate Gleason (1865-1933) was an American engineer and businesswoman, a pioneer of the machine-tool industry. The first woman admitted to Cornell University's engineering program, she also made her mark in the construction of prefabricated concrete housing.
Frequently asked questions
Key Facts
- Born in 1865 in Rochester (New York State), she joined the family business, Gleason Works, while still a teenager.
- In 1884, she became one of the first women admitted to the Sibley College of Engineering at Cornell University.
- In 1914, she became the first woman admitted as a full member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).
- Around 1917, she became president of a national bank (First National Bank of East Rochester), a first for a woman in the United States.
- She developed subdivisions of prefabricated concrete houses (Concrest) and died in 1933.
Works & Achievements
As secretary-treasurer, she managed the accounts and sold the family machine tool as far afield as Europe, propelling the company onto the world market.
Her technical mastery and commercial talent made this precision machine known throughout the international mechanical industry.
Her admission to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers paved the way for women in learned societies of engineers.
Regarded as the first woman to head an American national bank, she turned around its financial situation.
She designed fireproof dwellings produced almost in series, pioneering prefabricated construction and affordable housing.
After the war, she invested in the rebuilding of this village in the Aisne using her concrete construction techniques.
Her fortune, managed by the family foundation, led to an engineering school being named after her, a lasting tribute to her career.
Anecdotes
In 1884, at age 19, Kate Gleason enrolled at Cornell University's Sibley College of Engineering: she was the first woman to enter the program. But when the family business hit a rough patch, she left her university studies to help her father in the workshop. She would never earn her degree, yet she would become one of the most famous engineers of her time.
On her sales tours across Europe, Kate Gleason knew the family company's bevel-gear planer so thoroughly that many industrialists believed she was the machine's inventor. She always set the record straight, crediting the invention to her father William and her brother, all while remaining the firm's most formidable salesperson.
In 1914, Kate Gleason became the first woman admitted as a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), one of the most prestigious engineering learned societies in the United States, in a machine-tool world that was almost exclusively male.
In 1917, when the president of the First National Bank of East Rochester went off to war, Kate Gleason took over the running of the institution: she is regarded as the first woman to head a national bank in the United States. She restored the institution's finances before handing it back upon his return.
Fascinated by Henry Ford's assembly lines, Kate Gleason applied the idea of mass production to housing: she had fireproof, affordable six-room concrete houses poured in her “Concrest” development in East Rochester. She also became the first woman member of the American Concrete Institute.
Primary Sources
Kate Gleason is the ideal businesswoman I dreamed of fifty years ago.
Kate Gleason, of Rochester (New York), is admitted as the first woman member of the society of mechanical engineers.
Miss Gleason is building at East Rochester mass-produced poured-concrete houses, fireproof and sold at low prices, using methods inspired by automobile manufacturing.
Kate Gleason, engineer, businesswoman and builder, has died in Rochester; a pioneer in the machine-tool industry, she leaves a fortune intended for educational causes.
Key Places
Kate Gleason's hometown and home of Gleason Works, the family factory making gear-cutting machines. She lived and died there.
At this university's Sibley College, Kate Gleason became in 1884 the first woman enrolled in the engineering program.
Where she ran a national bank and built the “Concrest” development of concrete houses.
A village near Soissons devastated by World War I, which Kate Gleason helped rebuild with concrete houses.
A town in the San Francisco Bay area where she led real estate projects, extending her passion for building.
A small coastal town she helped revitalize through her investments and construction projects.
