Catherine Anselm Gleason (November 24, 1865 – January 9, 1933) was an American engineer and businesswoman known for her accomplishments in the field of engineering and for her philanthropy. Starting at a young age, she managed several roles in the family-owned Gleason Works in Rochester, New York, and later used her experience to launch a successful career in finance and construction. Through a combination of formal education and work experience with the Gleason Works, she earned recognition as an engineer and was elected to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 1914 as their first woman member. Gleason is the namesake of the Kate Gleason College of Engineering at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Early life and education Catherine Anselm Gleason was born on November 24, 1865, in Rochester, New York. She was the first of four children of William and Ellen McDermott Gleason, emigrants from Ireland. William was the owner of a machine tool company, later named Gleason Works. He developed a machine to automatically plane bevel gears in 1874, and Gleason Works became a prominent gear cutting company. When Kate was 11, her stepbrother Tom died of typhoid fever, causing hardship for both the family and the company, where he had assisted William. Shortly after, she began working for her father to fill Tom's role and became a bookkeeper for the company. In 1884, at the age of 19, Gleason enrolled in the Cornell Mechanical Arts program, becoming the first woman in the university's engineering program. She was unable to complete her studies at Cornell due to renewed trouble at the Gleason factory. William had hired a man to replace her in the business, but the firm started struggling financially and he could no longer afford to pay her replacement. At his request, she returned to Rochester. She was never able to return to full-time studies to complete a degree, but through training and self-learning she earned the title of engineer and was recognized for her accomplishments. She received some further education as a part-time student at the Sibley College of Engraving and The Mechanics Institute (later renamed the Rochester Institute of Technology).
Gleason Works Gleason resumed her work at Gleason Works and soon rose to new positions. She was named company secretary and treasurer, and additionally became a traveling salesperson. Demand for gears soared in the 1890s as bicycle and automobile manufacturing began. In 1893, she toured Europe to expand the company's business, an early attempt at globalization by an American manufacturer, and succeeded at finding several new foreign customers. She made a second European trip to represent the company at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. In the long term, international sales became an important component of the company's revenue. In 1997, nearly three quarters of the company's sales were international.
Fred H. Colvin described Gleason in his memoirs asa kind of Madame Curie of machine tools […] Kate spent her youth learning her father's business from the ground up, both in the shop and in the field, so that when she branched out for herself about 1895 as a saleswoman for her father's gear-cutting machines, she knew as much as any man in the business. In addition to her depth of knowledge, Gleason attributed her success in sales to her uniqueness in a male-dominated profession:In those early days I was a freak; I talked of gears when a woman was not supposed to know what a gear was. It did me much good. For, no matter how much men disapproved of me, they were at least interested in seeing me, one distinct advantage I had over the ordinary salesman.After her first trip to Europe, Gleason began to pay careful attention to her dress and public habits. She would select extremely feminine outfits to wear, used her sense of humor to charm customers, and went as far as to take voice lessons to practice the ideal pitch. She claimed that customers would recall a dress or hat she wore during a sale years later. James Gleason, a later CEO of Gleason Corporation, credited most of the company's global expansion to her work as its representative. A misconception arose that she, not her father, had invented the company's bevel planer, and the idea was promoted by her acquaintance Henry Ford. The company's expansion necessitated larger facilities, and the family relocated their factory from Brown's Race to University Avenue between 1904 and 1911. Gleason had the new foundry modeled after the Pisa Cathedral to create a large interior space for overhead cranes. During this time, she also constructed a house for herself on East Avenue, which she named Clones, after the town of origin of her mother Ellen.
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