Bertha was born on her family's farm near Springfield, Ohio, (Clark County) on Dec. 16, 1869.

Bertha Lamme-Feicht
Gifted engineer and pioneer, Bertha Lamme was born on her family's farm near Springfield, Ohio on December 16, 1869 and died in Pittsburgh on November 20, 1943.
She graduated from Olive Branch High School in 1887.
She was the first woman to receive an engineering degree from The Ohio State University when she graduated from their Mechanical Engineering Department in 1893. Lamme today is considered to be the first American woman to graduate in a main discipline of engineering other than civil engineering.

After graduation, she went to work at Westinghouse Company where she worked in mathematics and machine design on a team of engineers, led by her brother Benjamin. A 1907 B_Lamme2edition of the Pittsburgh Dispatch reported "[Bertha] Lamme's work in designing dynamos and motors won her reputation, even in that hotbed of gifted electricians and inventors."
In Benjamin's autobiography (1926), Bertha wrote "I have been asked to tell of his (Benjamin's) influence on leading me into an engineering course for my college work. I cannot recall that he ever directly urged me to study along such lines, but he must, by suggestion and his own enthusiasm for such work, have led my mind in that direction. I had no aptitude for mechanics, but I did have a liking for mathematics. For this reason, he probably thought I would succeed in engineering." Her achievements were reported to have inspired fellow women contemporaries to study engineering, but were accomplished in a time where women were welcome to compete with men only until they were married.
She worked at Westinghouse until 1905 when she married Russell Feicht (OSU class of 1890 and Director of Engineering at Westinghouse at the time) and thereafter did engineering work at home in addition to her role as wife and mother.
Her daughter Florence, born in 1910, became a physicist and was employed by the U.S. Bureau of Mines at the time of her passing.

Bertha Lamme's work has been honored by numerous groups such as the Society of Women Engineers through their "Bertha Lamme Memorial Scholarship" and the "Bertha Lamme-Westinghouse Scholarship Grant."


Benjamin Garver Lamme was born on a farm near Springfield, Ohio, on January 12, 1864, and graduated from Olive Branch High School in 1883. From an early age, Lamme tinkered with machinery and made experiments of his ideas on the family farm. In later years he was able to solve complex problems in his engineering work using mental calculations, instead of a slide rule.
He graduated in mechanical engineering from The Ohio State University in 1888.
After a few months back on the farm, Benjamin joined the Westinghouse Company in 1889.
Lamme designed a single-reduction railway motor with machine-wound coils which was marketed by Westinghouse beginning in 1891. He designed much of the apparatus for the Westinghouse exhibit at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

In addition to his design work on the Niagara Falls alternators, Lamme designed the "monster machine" for the power plant of the Manhattan Elevated Railway in New York City. The plant used eight slow-speed direct-current generators, each of which was forty feet high and weighed approximately a million pounds.
He was among the leaders in the introduction of large turboelectric generators which began to supplant older slow-speed, engine-driven, generators in the first decade of the 20th century. Lamme received 162 patents during his career.

Benjamin Lamme became chief engineer at Westinghouse in 1903 and held the position for the rest of his life.

During World War I, he represented the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE) on the Naval Consulting Board. He received the Edison Medal of the AIEE in 1919 in recognition for his contributions to the electrical power field.

Lamme had a lifelong interest in archaeology and had a sizable personal collection of projectile points and other artifacts. He was also an amateur photographer and had an interest in mathematical puzzles.
Lamme never married, and made his home with his sisters.

He died in Pittsburgh on July 8, 1924 at the age of 60. His will included a bequest to AIEE which was used to initiate the Lamme Medal in 1928 to recognize outstanding design engineers in the power field.
He also endowed two engineering scholarships at Ohio State University, and contributed to the support and education of a number of French orphans after World War I.
His autobiography, which included a list of his published papers, was published in 1926, and the Westinghouse Company published a collection of his technical papers in 1919.

----------------------------------------------
:
Bertha A. Lamme

Gender:
Female

Birth Place:
Clark, Ohio

Birth Date:
24 Dec 1869

Father's Name:
James G. Lamme

Mother's Name:
Sarah Garver

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