Bertha Lamme – A Charged Life. America’s First Woman Electrical Engineer

Bertha Lamme – A Charged Life

America’s First Woman Electrical Engineer

By John A. Dalles

Bertha Lamme at her drafting board at Westinghouse

Bertha Avanella Lamme was descended from pre-Revolutionary American stock on both sides of her family, and grew up in Ohio on a farm that had been deeded to her paternal great grandfather bearing the signature of President James Madison. By the time Bertha Lamme was born, her family had been farming the same acreage in Ohio for more than half a century.  Hers was the fourth generation of Lammes to call it home.

The Lammes had departed France for Holland because of the terrible persecutions of the Huguenots in the sixteenth century.  Bertha’s ancestors settled in Northern Ireland for a time, and then sought greater freedoms and opportunities in the New World.

When Bertha’s great-great grandfather William Lamme left the North of Ireland and settled in the colony of Virginia in 1730, he brought his faith and determination with him. 

Bertha Lamme’s great grandfather, the son of William and Anna Lamme, was James Lamme.  James Lamme was born in 1745 in Augusta County, Virginia, and he died in 1815 in Clark County, Ohio.  .  He married Elizabeth Givens.  Elizabeth was born in 1755 in Augusta County, Virginia, and died in 1815 in Clark County, Ohio. 

James and Elizabeth settled on a farm in Clark County, Ohio, and they are buried in a graveyard on their farm.  It was on this farm that their great granddaughter Bertha and her siblings would be born and raised—a farm that remains in the family to this day.  At the time the Lammes moved to Ohio it was still considered to be part of the western frontier. 

Not far away, on the banks of the Honey Creek, twelve miles west of Springfield and sixteen miles northeast of Dayton, stands the town of New Carlisle; its origins date to 1810, when it was plated by William Reyburn and called York.  The town’s first location was supplanted in 1812; as the current site was begun, its name was changed to Monroe in honor of the President.  In 1828, the town was renamed for the last time, to New Carlisle.

During Bertha Lamme’s childhood, the population of the town of New Carlisle, excluding the surrounding farms, was about 870.    On the Lamme family’s regular trips to town, they rode over streets that were set on a grid and gravel paved, past sturdy and neatly kept homes.  Familiar landmarks included the town hall, the Odd Fellow’s and Masonic halls and five churches.  The Lamme’s could shop at two dry goods stores, two drug stores, five grocery stores, a hardware store, a tailor’s shop, two milliners, a shoe store, a bakery and confectionary, two harness shops, two tin and stove stores, two furniture and cabinet stores.  The town featured a notions store, two meat markets and two nurseries.  New Carlisle also boasted a carriage factory, a wagon shop, two livery and feed stores, five blacksmith shops, a cooper, two shoe manufactures and two hotels. Neat, compact and inviting, New Carlisle was a prosperous and pleasant place.

The Lamme farm was part of the rich and productive grain district surrounding New Carlisle that produced a vast amount of wheat, corn, rye, barley, flax-seed, potatoes, hay and grass seeds, as well as supplying beef, pork and sheep, all on land to be found within a four-mile radius of the village.

Bertha’s older brother, Benjamin Garver Lamme (1864-1924), born on that same farm near Springfield and educated at The Ohio State University, was a celebrated electrical engineer and inventor of wide reputation with 162 electrical patents. As Chief Engineer of the Westinghouse Electric Company, he was responsible for many significant improvements in electrical machinery.

BG had led the way.  Their father had hoped BG would attend a church-related college, insisting that the Ohio State University, without any religious affiliation, was anathema.  BG retorted, “I want to be an engineer, not an infidel.”  The Ohio State University to which first BG and later Bertha made their way was one of the land grant colleges established as a direct result of the Morrill Land Grand Act of 1862 and the Cannon Act of 1870.

It was her brother BG’s influence that prompted Bertha to take the course in electrical engineering,-a field until then foreign to women, and technically speaking, still in its infancy.

There had been so few other women graduates in the field of engineering before Bertha Lamme, that we can briefly note their remarkable achievements here.  In 1884, Kate Gleason had enrolled at Cornell University as a special student, and she may be the first woman in the United States to study mechanical engineering.  Her studies were conducted also at Sibley College of Engineering and Mechanics Institute (later Rochester Institute of Technology) and she is credited with both industrial design and administrative leadership at the Gleason Works, a family business manufacturing machining equipment.  (Gleason is credited with having co-designed Gleason Works machinery with her father).

Earlier, in 1876, Elizabeth Bragg had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in civil engineering—a field then closely aligned to architectural studies.  It was not until 1894 that a second woman would graduate from Berkeley with an engineering degree—namely, Julia Morgan, who studied at the College of Mechanics and soon became William Randolph Hearst’s favorite residential architect, helping to create his eccentric retreats at San Simeon and Wintoon.  (In the forty years 1900-1940, only two more women would attain engineering degrees at Berkeley).  This dearth of women in the engineering field was an international phenomenon. 

Bertha was the first woman to concentrate her studies on electrical engineering—which at that time was arguably the most technologically challenging of all the engineering disciplines.  As her brother BG notes in his autobiography, many of the questions that he and the other remarkable graduates of the electrical programs at OSU were asking could not at that time be answered, since the knowledge was not yet there.  Bertha, BG and fellow OSU graduate Russell S. Feicht would be among the pioneering electrical engineers to find the answers and lead the electrical industry for a half-century to come.

In the Ohio State University newsletter about the 1893 graduation, we learn that there must have been about 12 graduates in engineering. The article reports that when Bertha Lamme’s name was read and as she crossed the stage to receive her diploma, there was applause and cheering.  Even then, they knew something special was happening.

When Bertha was studying engineering, and BG was getting his start in the profession, he told her that they would go into designing mechanical toys together.  He described it as a ‘big field’, but by the time she joined him at Westinghouse, he was doing bigger things.

 A graduate of Ohio State University, Bertha came to Westinghouse in 1898 and remained there until 1905.  During her career in electrical engineering, Bertha earned a reputation as an expert mathematician.  Her work in designing motors and generators and calculating horsepower and her mastery over the slide rule made her famous.

In the years that Bertha Lamme worked for Westinghouse, the company had grown in size and scope. The sophistication of their products had increased exponentially.  The superiority of alternating current had not only been proven to the satisfaction of the world, but also had become the world standard for electrification.  The American landscape had undergone changes that would not end with this era. Changes that included The 1893 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago, which had been a “Great White City” not only in terms of the color of its Beaux Arts inspired architecture, but also because all through the night, it offered fair-goers from across the nation the world’s greatest display of incandescent lighting up until that time.  The intoxicating vision of that fair was etched in countless minds and taken back to every village, town and city, to become part of the City Beautiful movement. To be a modern city was to be an electrically-lighted city.  

The first major alternating-current Westinghouse power plant at Niagara Falls clearly demonstrated the practical advantages of Westinghouse’s system.  The 1896 trolley system created to be run by alternating current in Buffalo, New York, hinted at the possibilities of electrical rapid transit.  In 1900 Westinghouse built the first steam turbine-generator for a U.S. electric utility (Hartford Electric Light Company), revolutionizing generation of electricity from coal.  In 1905 came the first demonstration of main-line locomotive powered by single-phase alternating current, as well as the first electric motor drive for main rolls in steel mill.  Bertha had a hand in all of them.  Shy, quiet and brilliant, Bertha Lamme had helped change the entire nature of American life. 

As remarkable as these achievements were, and as stimulating as Bertha found the work to be, she was about to enter a new phase of her life, one which would take her from the center of the rapidly expanding electrical industry to an era of personal fulfillment of an altogether different kind.

Unfortunately, there are no family papers to document the first meeting of Bertha A. Lamme and Russell S. Feicht.  Oral tradition maintains that they met as fellow students at Ohio State.  The tantalizing possibility is that they had already become fond of one another at college, before both of them went to work at Westinghouse. As likely as it may be, it remains conjecture.  Perhaps in some forgotten letter or diary of a classmate from that time there exists an account of their first meeting and their growing friendship. However, there is nothing in writing to verify or disprove this theory. Obviously, they knew one another from the years when they both had been students at the same time at the fledgling Ohio State University.  They were among a few handfuls of students who were studying the same disciplines.  And since Feicht and Bertha’s brother BG had been friends at college, it is virtually assured that Russell and Bertha were aware of each other from that time onward.

Bertha Avanella Lamme and Russell Stimson Feicht were married at her mother and brother and sisters' home in the East End, which was on the corner of Friendship and Stratford Avenues. (230 Stratford Avenue, a big late Victorian house).

Bertha was slender; she had a 19-inch waist when she was married.  Her granddaughter Dorothy Lamme Boyer has Bertha's wedding dress, which was altered (at the waist, not in length) for Bertha's  daughter Florence Feicht Boyer for her wedding to Robert Boyer.  Bertha stood at about 5' 5" or 5' 6" tall, the same height as her daughter and granddaughter.  On the bridal gown, Bertha wore a gold and diamond pin, a wedding gift from the groom. 

It is fair to say that the Lamme and Feicht families, while welcome in occasional social gatherings that included Pittsburgh’s elite, were contented to find themselves among the quiet, unassuming and comfortable upper middle class, in which life revolved around family and hearth. They were not listed Pittsburgh’s “Blue Books” in the Pittsburgh social register, although they arguably could have been—many of their East End neighbors who accomplished less were. The Lamme and Feicht social circles included some long-time colleagues from Westinghouse, a group of friends from the Higland Presbyterian Church, a few like-minded neighbors, but consisted chiefly of members of their own family circle.

Bertha Lamme Feicht lived at 1115 Portland Street after her marriage to Russell Feicht.  Their daughter Florence Lamme Feicht Boyer was born there on April 19, 1910, and lived there until she moved to the Fox Chapel suburb in 1954. (She died on January 8, 1997).

Family holidays were always spent at “The Aunties”, that is, the house on Stratford Avenue.  This closeness of family which brought each of the generations strength and joy was of a more mingled for Florence.  On Christmas, for instance, soon after her gifts were open, the family would take themselves the several blocks to The Aunties’ where they would spend the remainder of Christmas day.  While there were presents from the aunties, the centerpiece of the family celebration was a formal Christmas dinner, in the big dining room, where a small child was expected to be on her best behavior through what seemed to her to be interminable courses and the often boring adult conversation.  Without her newly opened presents, and surrounded by adults (albeit doting upon her) Florence longed for home.  So much so that when she had children of her own, she decreed that to fully enjoy the day, she would not cook—and so each year the family enjoyed a Christmas dinner of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Bertha Lamme Feicht died late Friday, November 20, 1943.  Funeral services were conducted at the H. Samson Funeral Home, 537 Neville Street, with burial in Homewood Cemetery.  Bertha’s legacy is remembered not only by her grandchildren John and Dorothy Boyer, but by all who have a keen interest in the role of women in the field of electrical engineering.

Copyright © 2019, John A. Dalles