During the latter half of the nineteenth century, the pioneering companies of George Westinghouse played a significant role in numerous technological advancements in the United States. The Westinghouse Air Brake Company, for instance, reduced railway accidents and runaway trains with an invention that likewise served as the company’s name, while it was the electrical innovation of the Westinghouse Electric Company that provided lighting at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois.
It wasn’t just the companies of Westinghouse that were pioneers, however, but the employees as well, including a young woman named Bertha Lamme. Although little is officially known of Lamme’s life and career, she still has the distinction of being the first American woman to earn a degree in mechanical engineering when she graduated from Ohio State University in 1893.
Bertha later followed in her brother Benjamin’s footsteps to both Pittsburgh and the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, where she was subsequently employed for twelve years as a motor designer. Bertha Lamme retired from Westinghouse in 1905 upon her marriage to fellow engineer Russell Feicht, living in relative obscurity until her death in 1943.
Despite such a limited biography, Bertha Lamme can be considered a true trendsetter nonetheless. An article in the December 1899 edition of Woman’s Journal – based on a report in the New York Sun from the previous month – called Lamme “the particular star among American women electricians,” and noted that she “designs machinery, makes calculations, and does exactly the work of a male electrical engineer.”
In her 1995 book Mothers and Daughters of Invention, researcher Autumn Stanley uses the highlights of Bertha Lamme’s known biography to argue that Lamme served a more prominent role at Westinghouse than official records might suggest. Lamme, for instance, had a close relationship with her brother Benjamin, who both encouraged Bertha’s attendance at Ohio State University and even served as his sister’s unofficial tutor during her college years. Bertha Lamme even once noted that the two siblings had considered forming their own mechanical toy company after graduation.
Benjamin Lamme was chief engineer at the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company, and contributed to the design of both the induction motor and rotary. Bertha Lamme was part of Benjamin’s team at Westinghouse, and their projects together included the first turbogenerators for the hydroelectric plant at Niagara Falls and the motors that operated the power plant of the Manhattan Elevated Railroad.
Benjamin also registered a number of patents, and was respected enough within his field to author an autobiography, in which he writes that his sister “took up the work of calculation of machines.” Despite the simplistic nature of the statement, Autumn Stanley points out that Ohio State University later named one of its laboratories in honor of both Lammes, not just Benjamin.
Bertha Lamme was not recruited to Westinghouse by Benjamin Lamme, however, but Albert Schmid. Schmid was personally hired by George Westinghouse, became Westinghouse’s first chief engineer before rising to general superintendent, and later organized the various branches of the Westinghouse Company in Europe. Given his own notable credentials, Albert Schmid obviously saw something equally impressive in Bertha Lamme.
“A real question remains whether Bertha Lamme did not actually contribute more to the early achievements at Westinghouse than revealed by ‘taking up the calculation of machines,’ and whether Benjamin Lamme as chief engineer could conceivably have given her such an important charge if she did not possess something more than a good head for numbers,” Autumn Stanley contends in Mothers and Daughters of Invention. “What we can say for certain is that she held a professional position which by its very nature would seem to dictate a basic contribution to many of the most famous of Westinghouse’s early motors and generators, machines that ushered in the modern industrial era in the United States.”
Although Bertha Lamme’s abrupt retirement from Westinghouse upon her marriage to fellow engineer Russell Feicht could simply be considered a “tradition of the day,” Benjamin Lamme notes in his autobiography that his sister “had taken an engineering degree in the Ohio State University more for the pleasure of it than anything else.” Bertha Lamme may very well have been the more inventive and mathematically gifted of the Lamme siblings – as Autumn Stanley suggests – but building a career and upstaging her brother were apparently not vocations that ultimately interested her.
Autumn Stanley uncovered on an unpublished document in the Westinghouse Company’s files that names Bertha Lamme as a “designing engineer” and “one of the few women who have made a notable success of this work.” Stanley also mentions that historian Guenter Holzer considered Lamme as “the first representative of a new breed of engineers who could succeed by mathematical ability and book learning alone, without extensive practical experience.”
The Senator John Heinz History Center commemorates Lamme in its permanent Pittsburgh: A Tradition of Innovation exhibit with a small display containing Lamme’s slide rule, a drawing Lamme created of a drill bit, and other personal belongings from her time at Westinghouse, including a jeweled purse and wedding invitation for her nuptials with Russell Feicht.
“A woman in a man’s world,” the History Center declares of Bertha Lamme. “Never before had a female sat at the drafting table with men to compute, calculate and design the tools, motors and machinery that powered the new era of electricity.” Not bad for someone who merely “took up the work of calculation of machines,” and a fitting tribute to one of the true pioneers within the field of women engineering as well.
Anthony Letizia