Gleason Corporation

Gleason Corporation is a prominent machine tool builder based in Rochester, New York, USA. It has manufacturing plants in the USA, Britain, India, and Germany, and sales offices in those and additional countries.

Gleason's importance lies in gear manufacturing—especially in building the machine tools that themselves make the gears. These gears and these machines are sold to industrial customers in a wide variety of fields, such as companies in the automotive and aerospace industries.

The Gleason works, the machine shop that eventually evolved into the Gleason Corporation, was founded by Irish immigrant William Gleason in 1865 after his previous experience in other machine shops.

An important product came in 1874 with William's invention of the first bevel gear planer, a planer with integral indexing head designed to specialize in planing bevel gears. Planers and indexing heads had been combined before, but never in the winning form factor that William created specifically for gears.

Willam's daughter Kate was integral to the company's early operations, along with brothers James E. and Andrew C. She was an early leader in demonstrating that cultural bias against women (or condescending patronizing of women) was not founded in reality, and that women could hold demanding positions in mechanical engineering and sales engineering.

After engineers at Packard developed spiral bevel gears, Gleason pioneered the machine tools to mass-produce them (with automotive differentials being the primary market). Packard and Gleason settled an infringement lawsuit regarding Packard's patents (U.S. Patent 725,328 and U.S. Patent 1,209,682) and Gleason's patent (U.S. Patent 1,325,784).

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