Energetic Trailblazers: Kate Gleason, Edith Clarke, and Mária Telkes

Abstract

The three women featured in this chapter – Kate Gleason (1865–1933), Edith Clarke (1883–1959), and Mária Telkes (1900–1995) – were truly “energetic trailblazers” during their lifetimes and their legacies today are very much alive. The chapter is presented in chronological order, describing each of these women’s work in related fields and begins during the early decades of the 1900s. To set some context for that time period, Kate Gleason was a close friend and mentee of Susan B. Anthony. This fact helps set the stage for a wider view of this period of women’s suffrage activism and the variety of fronts on which women were forging ahead and breaking new ground for women in their own ways. There are several similarities between the three women and overlapping themes linking their lives and work. All three were alive during World War I and felt its impact, and each had an early initial interest in science and engineering and achieved recognition during her lifetime. They each continue to have a transformative impact well beyond their individual lives and careers, and we all benefit from their legacies today.

Introduction

The three women featured in this chapter – Kate Gleason (1865–1933), Edith Clarke (1883–1959), and Mária Telkes (1900–1995) – were truly “energetic trailblazers” during their lifetimes and their legacies today are very much alive. They each continue to have a transformative impact well-beyond their individual lives and careers. The chapter is presented in chronological order, describing each of these women’s work in related fields and begins during the early decades of the 1900s.

After more than 50 years of action led in large part by Susan B. Anthony of Rochester, New York, the years 1900–1920 were very active years for women’s suffrage. At the end of those two decades, during which Anthony died and many others took up the mantle, the USA ratified the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution which granted full voting rights to American women (Equality Day – August 26, 1920).

Kate Gleason was a close friend and mentee of Susan B. Anthony and also lived in Rochester, New York. This fact helps set the stage for a wider view of this moment of women’s suffrage activism and the variety of fronts on which women were forging ahead and breaking new ground for women in their own ways. Although Gleason is not as widely recognized as being a part of a larger community of change, she served as a significant pioneer and trailblazer.

While creating and editing this chapter, we wondered if these three women would have known each other. It’s likely that Edith Clarke and Mária Telkes knew each other or knew of each other. Both were awarded the Society of Women Engineers’ (SWE) Achievement Award within 2 years of each other. SWE was founded in 1949–1950 and, in 1952, Mária Telkes was the first recipient of the new society’s Achievement Award. Two years later, in 1954, Edith Clarke received the award. According to SWE’s history:

“A woman who receives an Achievement Award is often described as a fast tracker, a doer, an achiever, highly motivated. A person who gets things done [1]”. Until 1966, the Achievement Award was the only award SWE presented and “it was one of the few avenues of honor and acknowledgment women engineers were likely to have received. It remains the Society’s highest honor” [1].

Kate Gleason died in 1933 and therefore never knew of the Society of Women Engineers. However, she was well-known during her lifetime and in 1930 she attended the Second World Power Conference in Berlin, Germany, as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ representative, along with 3900 other engineers and scientists from at least 38 countries around the world. Professor Albert Einstein of Germany and Dr. H. Foster Bain, Secretary of the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers of America [2], gave two of the seven main plenary addresses at the conference [3, 4]. Clarke and Telkes likely knew of this large-scale international conference and may have heard of the woman representing American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

There are several similarities between the three women and overlapping themes linking their lives and work. All three were alive during World War I. The careers of Gleason and Clarke were impacted by the war primarily due to the exodus of men called into service. “By an irony of fate, war, always bitterly denounced by women, has advanced them in the engineering profession” [5]. Born in 1900, Telkes grew up in Budapest, Hungary, and would have personally felt the war’s impact as a teenager growing up in that city which experienced high inflation and food shortages during the war. Other similarities among the three include their early initial interests in science and engineering, the recognition that each achieved during their lifetimes, and that each engaged in numerous professional activities over their careers.

As you read this chapter, we offer some points for consideration:

• How these women strategically navigated professional and academic terrain that was not designed for them, likely quite inhospitable in many ways, and found ways to pursue their work and their passion and stand out among their male counterparts

• How they were all able to trust their knowledge and insight and act decisively on these, especially in contexts where they were all but certainly going to be presumed to be lacking in knowledge, skills, or simply wrong

• How they were able to seek out opportunities that others hadn’t been able to see and even to see opportunities precisely because they were presumed to be outsiders in these fields

• How they demonstrated determination that others would not stand in their way

• How they all had an impact that went well beyond their work, career, or professional life at any given moment and influential legacies that continue well beyond their own lives

We have several questions that remain about the three subjects of this chapter. Did these women know each other? Ever meet? What role did MIT play in enabling Clarke and Telkes to enter professional and academic life? What was it like for these women to be working in male disciplines and environments?

We also pose the following thought for consideration in light of the truly remarkable achievements of the three women featured. There is a risk in telling these stories of repeating the myth of the lone, genius, self-made person (usually masculine), and so it might be worth thinking about how these women excelled and were geniuses, certainly, yet also saw themselves as part of a larger community of change – whether for women’s rights, affordable housing, education, solar solutions to energy shortages, and so forth.

Kate Gleason (1865–1933)

Kate Gleason’s march into history began when she was 11 years old and her older stepbrother Tom died. Tom had worked with their father in his new business, and his death left the family devastated and the business short-handed. Kate decided that being a girl wasn’t going to stop her and soon made herself indispensable around the office. Although she studied mechanical engineering in college for a time, business called her back. She became the first woman to sell machine tools and equipment internationally, an early woman bank president, the first woman to take a company out of bankruptcy, and later became a developer of large-scale low-cost housing. An ardent supporter of women’s suffrage , Kate was also the first female member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). “By 1918, her work had so impressed the American Society of Mechanical Engineers that she was unanimously elected to membership as its first woman member” [6]. This trailblazing woman’s legacy lives on through the Rochester Institute of Technology where the Kate Gleason College of Engineering stands as the first engineering college to be named after a woman. As Gleason said, “I wanted one thing – to demonstrate that a business woman can work as well as a man” and she adopted her motto “Possum volo” – “I can if I will” [7, 8].

The oldest child of William Gleason and his second wife, Ellen McDermott Gleason, Catherine Anselm Gleason (Kate) had an older half-brother Tom and three young siblings [9]. Having been mechanically inclined as a child as well as intelligent, Gleason began reading books about engineering and machines by the time she was nine [10]. She was also an ardent tomboy:

My girlish ambitions were fiercely personal. I felt keenly that girls in this world were accorded second place, and I resented being second. My grandmother always wanted my brothers to take her about; she thought little of me. Friends and neighbors used to watch me, and shake their heads and remark:

“She should have been a boy.” They were justified, for I was trying my best to be as nearly a boy as I could. I wore my hair short and straight in a day when girls wore long curls or braids. I played with the boys. They didn’t want me, but I earned my right.

If we were jumping from the shed roofs I chose the highest spot; if we vaulted fences I picked the tallest. I was husky and able, and to this I added a bit of recklessness that carried me through. It took just that added bit of daring to outdo the rest. I carried that lesson into business. A bold front, determination, and the willingness to risk more than the crowd, plus some common sense, and hard work, wins out [8].

Kate’s half-brother, Tom, helped her father out in the business – a machine tool shop in Rochester, New York – The Gleason Works [6, 7]. William Gleason had invented the bevel gear planar, which eliminated hand cutting, in 1874 [11]. Shortly after Tom died of typhoid, when Kate was 11, she was terribly saddened to hear her father exclaim, “Oh, if Kate had only been a boy!” The very next Saturday, she “walked down to the shop, mounted a stool and demanded work.” Although such behavior was completely outside of the norm for girls of her era, her father might not have objected because suffragist Susan B. Anthony, a resident of Rochester, New York, was a friend of her mother’s [8, 9]! Her father gave her some bills to make out and she worked regularly from that point on. When she was 14, she decided that she could do the bookkeeping [8].

At age 19, in 1884, Kate became the first woman engineering student to enroll at Cornell University in the Mechanical Arts (now mechanical engineering) program. But her father’s business fell upon hard times and Kate was called home to work [9, 10].

That was my first big sorrow and my heart broke utterly. I took Father’s letter out on the campus and sat under a tree where I thought no one would find me, and wept and wept. I had planned to finish the engineering course. I was the only woman in it, and it meant so much. . .

Since I was nine I had been reading books on machines and engineering; my one year had given me the essentials of the profession. The rest I could do, and did do, for myself. My fierce determination to equal the young men I left at college served as a spur, and I worked with every bit of energy I possessed [8].

Gleason was able to briefly return to Cornell later, but health issues required her to return home [10]. She was never able to complete her degree although she did take additional courses at the Sibley College of Engraving and Mechanics Institute (today the Rochester Institute of Technology) and learned the rest of what she needed to be called an engineer through on-the-job training and self-education [9, 10].

From 1890 to 1913, Kate Gleason (Fig. 1) was the chief sales representative of Gleason Works as well as its Secretary, Treasurer. Her first sales call was to Ohio in 1888 to sell “machines,” explaining the complex technology and its benefits to potential customers [6, 11, 12]. She learned two lessons from her first sales call: “There is no sense in being scared of anyone; he may be more scared of you than you of him,” and “It pays to be first in any field, if you can” [8]. On subsequent business calls where every client was a man, her reputation often preceded her. Gleason took to heart the advice she had received from one of her mentors, Susan B. Anthony: “Any advertising is good. Get praise if possible, blame if you have to. But never stop being talked about” [8].

Fig. 1

Kate Gleason. (Courtesy of Rochester Institute of Technology)

Tool sales in the USA became significantly depressed due to the Panic of 1893, but the European economy was still strong. Thus, Gleason embarked on a long trip to Europe (there and back took 2 months and she travelled on a cattle steamer, not an ocean liner) and returned to the USA with orders from England, Scotland, France, and Germany [10]. Thus, she became one of the first international sales people in her industry and laid the foundation for a significant portion of the company’s business, as is still the case today [6, 9]. Interestingly, due to ill health, her doctor had recommended that she sojourn to Atlantic City, New Jersey, but she chose Europe as she had no customers in Atlantic City [6]! Due to the business downturn, she also recommended to her father that Gleason Works transition to gears and gear planing machines. Five years after this recommendation, Gleason Works was no longer in the tool making business [8].

She became a successful businesswoman in spite of her gender. Gleason was sometimes credited with Gleason Works’ inventions that she often vehemently denied creating while highlighting the rightful inventors within the company. In addition, she was not at all interested in marriage as she was more interested in her career. Her increasing fame and her untoward behavior (the proper place of women at the time was in the home and education was still thought to endanger a woman’s health) led to a rift with her brothers, and she left the family business in 1913 [6, 10].

In 1914, Gleason became the first woman in New York State to be appointed receiver by a bankruptcy court [12]. The company was the Ingle Machine Company in East Rochester, New York. At the time of her appointment, the company’s stock was worthless and it was significantly in debt. Under her leadership, a year and a half later, the debt was paid off. By 1917, the company had earned one million dollars [6].

In 1916, Gleason was one of the first women elected to the Rochester Chamber of Commerce and the first woman elected to the Rochester Engineering Society [6]. Sometime during the 1913–1919 time frame, Gleason became the first woman believed to have been elected to membership in Verein Deutscher Ingenieure, the German Engineering Society [12].¹ She was also active in the suffrage movement.

In 1917, she became the first woman with no family ties to become the president of a national bank [6, 9]. She was elected President of the First National Bank of East Rochester when the President was called to service during World War I. She had been a Director of the bank prior to this election as well as a business partner of the former president. During her tenure, she helped to start eight new businesses in East Rochester. One of the projects for which the bank had made a loan was to a local developer who had failed to complete his project. This project, the Concrest and Marigold Gardens, sparked Gleason’s interest in low-cost, standardized, concrete homes . The community was a subdivision of 100 six-room houses as well as a country club, golf course, and park. The homes included such amenities as mixing faucets, built-in bookcases, and a mirror in the kitchen [6, 12, 13]. After nearly a century, the homes in Concrest and Marigold Gardens subdivision still exist today with minimal repairs [14] (see Fig. 2, 3, and 4).

Fig. 2

Home and Garden in Concrest (1930s). (Courtesy of the Village of East Rochester)

Fig. 3

Homes in Concrest (1930s). (Courtesy of the Village of East Rochester)

Fig. 4

Map of Concrest. (Courtesy of the City of East Rochester)

Gleason became very interested in providing low-cost housing options due to her experiences with workers in manufacturing and financial companies. She developed new designs for such housing that were made of concrete and used a new pouring method that she developed. Her homes were described in the magazine, Concrete, in 1921. The article was titled “How a Woman Builds Houses to Sell at a Profit for $4,000.” “Concrete Kate,” as she was nicknamed, also became the first woman member of the American Concrete Institute in 1919 [4, 6, 9, 11]. Gleason applied techniques she had observed while studying operations at a car manufacturing facility:

My inspiration for mass production methods came from visits to the Cadillac factory, where Mr. Leland showed me the assembly of eight-cylinder engines. [4]

In 1924, Gleason was called to Berkeley, California, to advise the city on rebuilding after a fire. Newspaper articles of the time reference her as a builder and architect. She purchased property in Sausalito, California, intending to replicate her low-cost concrete home designs and built a few homes. The property, however, was needed for the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge, so she gave most of her holdings to a boy’s orphanage [6, 9].

Gleason also purchased an estate in Septmonts, France, in 1924 and restored that structure while providing assistance to the village’s recovery in the aftermath of World War I. The property included a castle tower and battlements from the twelfth century. She built a library and a motion picture theatre there as a memorial to the First Division of the American Expeditionary Force [6, 8, 10, 12].

In 1927, Gleason bought land in South Carolina that included 12 miles of beaches and the entirety of Dataw Island. She built homes and a hotel in Beaufort, South Carolina. At the time of her death, she was building an artists’ and writers’ colony on Lady’s Island, which was completed by her sister. The Beaufort Memorial Hospital occupies land that she gave to the town. The Kate Gleason Memorial Park is on land next to the hospital [6, 9, 11, 12].

In 1930, Kate Gleason traveled to Berlin, Germany, where she represented the ASME at the World Power Conference [4].

Today, Gleason Corporation is one of the world’s top purveyors of gear-making equipment , including machines, tooling, and technologies, for vehicles to airplanes, power tools to wind turbines [9]. And, Kate Gleason’s legacy lives on in other ways as well. A charitable fund established from her wealth upon her death later became part of the Gleason Foundation, one of the largest private foundations in Rochester. At the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), the Kate Gleason College of Engineering (KGCOE) became the first engineering school in the USA to be named for a woman. There is a Kate Gleason Hall (dormitory) at RIT. A Kate Gleason endowed chair was established there in 2003 for a faculty member who builds “upon the tradition of Kate Gleason as a role model for women in engineering.” This chapter’s co-author, Margaret Bailey, was the first professor to hold this position (2003–2009), and currently there are two women faculty who hold Kate Gleason endowed chair positions within KGCOE. There is also a Kate Gleason Scholarship, established in 1996, that provides full tuition for female students. The ASME, of which she became the first full woman member in 1918,² established a Kate Gleason Award in her memory in 2011. This Award is bestowed upon distinguished women leaders from the engineering profession [9, 11, 13].

Maybe Susan B. Anthony sums it up best in a book inscription to Kate Gleason:

Kate Gleason, the ideal business woman of whom I dreamed fifty years ago – A worthy daughter of a noble father. May there be many such in the years to come is the wish of. Yours affectionately, Susan B. Anthony, Rochester, NY, December 2, 1903. [10]

Edith Clarke (1883–1959)

A woman engineer with many firsts to her name, Edith Clarke (Fig. 5) grew up in Maryland without any intentions of even going to college. Orphaned by the time she was 12, Clarke attended boarding school, reached the age of 18 (the age of majority) and then decided to go to college so that she could find interesting work; work that replicated the interest she had discovered while playing duplicate whist (a card game). She spent the principal from her inheritance, against the advice of many family members and friends, to obtain an education because of a remembrance of a conversation she had with her mother years earlier in which her mother indicated her approval of a young man’s decision to spend his inheritance on a college education – and who thereafter became a brilliant lawyer [5].

Fig. 5

Edith Clarke. (Courtesy Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University)

After graduating from Vassar with an A.B. in mathematics and astronomy in 1908 (Phi Beta Kappa), Clarke taught math and science for 3 years in San Francisco and West Virginia. But teaching was not holding her interest, and she decided to pursue becoming an engineer instead. She enrolled as a civil engineering undergraduate student at the University of Wisconsin and remained there for a year [15,16,17]. Then, she went to work for American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T) as a computing assistant. She intended to return to the University of Wisconsin to complete her engineering studies but found the work so interesting at AT&T that she stayed for 6 years [5]. Clarke is an example of an early “computer” – woman with advanced training in mathematics who performed calculations for engineers (men) [17].

During World War I, Clarke supervised the women at AT&T who did computations for research engineers in the Transmission Department and studied radio at Hunter College and electrical engineering at Columbia University at night. Eventually, she enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and received her master’s degree in electrical engineering in 1919, the first woman awarded that degree from MIT [17]. Upon graduation, she wanted to work for either General Electric (GE) or Westinghouse. But even with her stellar credentials, no one would hire her as an engineer because of her gender – they had no openings for a woman engineer! In 1920, after a long job search, GE offered Clarke a computing job, directing women computers who were calculating the mechanical stresses in turbines for the turbine engineering department at GE [5, 17].

But Clarke wanted to be an electrical engineer! Since that was not the job she was offered and since she wanted to travel the world, she left GE in 1921 to teach physics at the Constantinople Women’s College (now Istanbul American College) in Turkey. She was able to also visit France, Switzerland, Italy, Egypt, Austria, Germany, Holland, and England during her time abroad. A year later, GE did offer her a job as an electrical engineer in the central station engineering department. At last, she had found work as interesting as a duplicate whist game [5, 17]! With this offer, she became the first professionally employed female electrical engineer in the USA [18].

Clarke’s area of specialty was electric power systems and problems related to its operation. She made innovations in long-distance power transmission and the development of the theory of symmetrical components and circuit analysis [17]. Symmetrical components are a mathematical means by which engineers can study and solve problems of power system losses and performance of electrical equipment. Clarke literally wrote the landmark textbook in this area, Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems, Symmetrical and Related Components (1943) (Fig. 6) and a second volume in 1950. This textbook, in its two volumes, was used to educate all power system engineers for many years [5, 17, 18].

Fig. 6

Title page – Edith Clarke’s Circuit Analysis of A-C Power Systems, Symmetrical and Related Components (Signed). (Courtesy of Jill S. Tietjen, P.E.)

Clarke published 18 technical papers during her employment at GE reflecting her status as an authority on the topics of hyperbolic functions, equivalent circuits, and graphical analysis within electric power systems. The papers were published in organs including The General Electric Review, the American Institute of Electrical Engineers (AIEE)’s Transactions, Electrical Engineering, and the AIEE Journal. Her first paper, titled “Transmission Line Calculations,” was published in the General Electric Review in June 1923 and describes her mechanical calculator. “Simplified Transmission Line Calculations,” which appeared in the General Electric Review in May 1926, provided charts for transmission line calculations. She was also involved in the design of hydroelectric dams in Western USA [5, 18].

Clarke received a patent in 1925 (U.S. Patent No. 1,552,113 – Fig. 7) for her “graphical calculator” – a method of considering the impacts of capacity and inductance on long electrical transmission lines. It greatly simplified the calculations that needed to be done. In 1926, she was the first woman to address what is today the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) – at the time it was the AIEE [17]. Her topic was “Steady-State Stability in Transmission Systems” [5]. In 1932, Clarke became the first woman to present a paper before the AIEE; her paper, “Three-Phase Multiple-Conductor Circuits,” was named the best paper of the year in the northeastern district. This paper examined the use of multiple conductor transmission lines with the aim of increasing the capacity of the power lines. In 1948, Clarke was named one of the first three women fellows of IEEE [17]. She had previously become the first female full voting member of IEEE [18]. Clarke was also the recipient of the Woman’s Badge from Tau Beta Pi (at a time before women were admitted to membership) [15]. She was one of the few women who were licensed professional engineers in New York State [5].

Fig. 7

Page 1 of Edith Clarke’s Graphical Calculator Patent – Number 1,552,113

A year after her retirement from GE in 1945, Clarke became an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Texas. In 1947, she rose to full professorship becoming the first woman professor of electrical engineering in the USA [17, 18]. She served on numerous committees and provided special assistance to graduate students through her position as graduate student advisor [17].

In 1954, Clarke received the Society of Women Engineers’ Achievement Award “in recognition of her many original contributions to stability theory and circuit analysis.” In 2015, she was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for her invention of the graphical calculator [18].

Mária Telkes (1900–1995)

A celebrated innovator in the field of solar energy , one of the first people to research practical ways for humans to use solar energy, and the so-called Sun Queen, Mária Telkes was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1900 [19,20,21]. She built her first chemistry laboratory when she was 10 years old [22]. Educated at Budapest University as a physical chemist (BA in 1920 and PhD in 1924), she became interested in solar energy as early as her freshman year in college when she read a book titled Energy Sources of the Future by Kornel Zelowitch, which described experiments with solar energy that were taking place, primarily in the USA [22].

Telkes served as an instructor at Budapest University after receiving her PhD Her life changed significantly, however, when she traveled to Cleveland, Ohio, to visit her uncle, who was the Hungarian consul. During her visit, she was offered a position as a biophysicist at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation in 1925, working with American surgeon George Washington Crile. During the time (1925–1937) that she was at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, she worked to create a photoelectric device to record brain waves [16, 21, 23]. She and Crile collaborated in writing a book titled Phenomenon of Life to report their findings. Her other work at the Foundation included looking at the source of the energy in brain waves, what happened to that energy when a cell dies, and the changes that occur when a normal cell becomes a cancer cell [20]. She spent her entire professional career in the USA [16].

In 1937, the same year she became a naturalized citizen, Telkes moved to Westinghouse Electric where for 2 years she developed and patented instruments for converting heat energy into electrical energy, so-called thermoelectric devices [16, 20, 21, 23]. In 1939, she began her work with solar energy as part of the Solar Energy Conversion Project at MIT. Initially, her role was working on thermoelectric devices that were powered by sunlight. During World War II, Telkes served as a civilian advisor to the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) where she was asked to figure out how to develop a device to convert salt water into drinking water [20, 23].

This assignment resulted in one of her most important inventions, a solar distiller that vaporized seawater and then recondensed it into drinkable water. Its significant advancement used solar energy (sunlight) to heat the seawater so that the salt was separated from the water [20, 23]. This distillation device (also referred to as a solar still) was included in the military’s emergency medical kits on life rafts and saved the lives of both downed airmen and torpedoed sailors. It could provide one quart of freshwater daily through the use of a clear plastic film and the heat of the sun and was perfect for use in warm, humid, tropical environments [16, 19, 18, 21, 24, 25]. Later, the distillation device was scaled up and used to supplement the water demands of the Virgin Islands [23]. For her work, Telkes received the OSRD Certificate of Merit in 1945 [20]. The first page of her patent for a solar still is shown in Fig. 8.

Fig. 8

Patent 3,415,719 Page 1 – Mária Telkes Patent for Collapsible solar still with water vapor permeable membrane

Telkes was named an associate research professor in metallurgy at MIT in 1945 [23]. During her years at MIT, she created a new type of solar heating system – one that converted the solar energy to chemical energy through the crystallization of a sodium sulfate solution (Glauber’s salt). Previous systems had stored the solar energy in the form of hot water or heated rocks [16, 20]. In 1948, Telkes and architect Eleanor Raymond developed a prototype five-room home built in Dover, Massachusetts [16, 22]. Called the Dover Sun House, this was the world’s first modern residence heated with solar energy and it used Telkes’s solar heating system [20, 23, 24]. The system was both efficient and cost-effective. It effectively heated the house during cold Massachusetts winters and cooled the house during the summer months. Solar collectors captured sunlight and warmed the air between double layers of glass and a black sheet of metal. That warmed air was then piped into the walls of the house, where it transferred the heat to the sodium sulfate to be stored and used at a later needed time. Thus, the walls of the house became the home’s heating system [20, 23].

She next spent 5 years (1953–1958) at New York University (NYU) as a solar energy researcher. At NYU, Telkes established a laboratory dedicated to solar energy research and continued working on solar stills, heating systems, and solar ovens [16, 19]. Her solar ovens proved to be cheap to make, simple, and easy to build and could be used by villagers worldwide. Children could use them and the ovens could be used for any type of cuisine. Tests of the oven showed that it reached 350 °F even when the temperatures outside were in the 60s. This meant the oven could bake bread or cook a roast. Her work also led her to the discovery of a faster way to dry crops. In 1954, she received a $45,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to further develop her solar ovens [11, 19, 25].

After NYU, she worked for Curtis-Wright Company as director of research for their solar energy laboratory (1958–1961). Here, she worked on solar dryers as well as the possible use of solar thermoelectric systems in outer space. She also designed the heating and energy storage systems for a laboratory building constructed by her employer in Princeton, New Jersey. This building included solar-heated rooms, a swimming pool, laboratories, solar water heaters, dryers for fruits and vegetables, and solar cooking stoves [20, 22].

In 1961, she moved to Cryo-Therm where she spent 2 years as a researcher working on space-proof and sea-proof materials for use in protecting sensitive equipment from the temperature extremes that would be experienced in those environments. Her work at Cryo-Therm was used on both the Apollo and Polaris projects [16, 19]. Subsequently, she served as the director of Melpar, Inc.’s solar energy laboratory looking at obtaining freshwater from seawater (1963–1969) before returning to academia at the University of Delaware. At the University of Delaware, Telkes served as a professor and research director for the Institute of Energy Conversion (1969–1977) and emerita professor from 1978. Here she worked on materials used to store solar energy as well as heat exchangers that could efficiently transfer energy. The experimental solar-heated building constructed at the University of Delaware, known as Solar One, used her methods. In addition, she researched air-conditioning systems that could store coolness during the night to be used during the heat of the following day [16, 19,20,21].

After her retirement, she continued to serve as a consultant on solar energy matters. In 1980, after the 1970s oil crisis and a renewed interest nationwide in solar energy, Telkes was involved with a second experimental solar-heated house, the Carlisle House, which was built in Carlisle, Massachusetts. The home had a solar photovoltaic array on the roof to produce electricity, extensive passive solar features to provide space heating, thermal collectors to provide domestic hot water, and many energy conservation measures to reduce electrical and thermal energy requirements [19, 26].

In 1952, Telkes was the first recipient of the Society of Women Engineers’ Achievement Award . The citation reads “In recognition of her meritorious contributions to the utilization of solar energy” [22] (see Fig. 9). In 1977, she received the Charles Greely Abbot Award from the American Section of the International Solar Energy Society, which was in recognition of her being one of the world’s foremost pioneers in the field of solar energy [19]. In that same year, she was honored by the National Academy of Sciences Building Research Advisory Board for her work in solar-heated building technology. She was a member of the Society of Women Engineers, the American Chemical Society, the Electrochemistry Society, and Sigma Xi (Scientific Research Society). The holder of more than 20 patents (shown in Table 1), in 2012, Telkes was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame [22, 24]. In addition to her patents, Telkes also had many publications on the topics of using the sunlight for heating, thermoelectric/solar generators and distillers, and the electrical conductivity properties of solid electrolytes [24]. She believed so strongly in using solar energy that she said, “Sunlight will be used as a source of energy sooner or later . . . Why wait?” [25].

Fig. 9

Mária Telkes (third from left) receives the first Society of Women Engineers Achievement Award during the 1952 American Society of Civil Engineers Centennial of Engineering in Chicago, Illinois. (l to r) Rodney Chipp, Beatrice Hicks, Mária Telkes, unknown, Dot Merrill, unknown. (Courtesy Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University)

Table 1 Mária Telkes Patents – Issued by US Patent and Trademark Office

The three women featured in this chapter – Kate Gleason, Edith Clarke, and Mária Telkes – were each remarkable and energetic trailblazers during their lifetimes. Their legacies today are very much alive through the ideas and devices that they created and through the inspiration that they invoke. They each continue to have a transformative impact well beyond their individual lives and careers.