Gleason Corporation is a prominent machine tool

Machine tool

A machine tool is a machine, typically powered other than by human muscle , used to make manufactured parts in various ways that include cutting or certain other kinds of deformation...

 company based in Rochester, New York

Rochester, New York

Rochester is a city in Monroe County, New York, south of Lake Ontario in the United States. Known as The World's Image Centre, it was also once known as The Flour City, and more recently as The Flower City...

, 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

Gear

A gear is a rotating machine part having cut teeth, or cogs, which mesh with another toothed part in order to transmit torque. Two or more gears working in tandem are called a transmission and can produce a mechanical advantage through a gear ratio and thus may be considered a simple machine....

 manufacturing—especially in building the machine tools that themselves make the gears

Gear cutting

Gear cutting is the process of creating a gear. The most common processes include hobbing, broaching, and machining; other processes include shaping, forging, extruding, casting, and powder metallurgy. Gears are commonly made from metal, plastic, and wood.-Broaching:For very large gears or splines,...

. These gears and these machines are sold to industrial customers in a wide variety of fields, especially prominent companies in the automotive and aerospace

Aerospace

Aerospace comprises the atmosphere of Earth and surrounding space. Typically the term is used to refer to the industry that researches, designs, manufactures, operates, and maintains vehicles moving through air and space...

 industries.

History

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

Planer (metalworking)

A planer is a type of metalworking machine tool that uses linear relative motion between the workpiece and a single-point cutting tool to machine a linear toolpath. Its cut is analogous to that of a lathe, except that it is linear instead of helical...

 with integral indexing head

Indexing head

An indexing head, also known as a dividing head or spiral head, is a specialized tool that allows a workpiece to be circularly indexed; that is, easily and precisely rotated to preset angles or circular divisions...

 designed to specialize in planing bevel gear

Bevel gear

Bevel gears are gears where the axes of the two shafts intersect and the tooth-bearing faces of the gears themselves are conically shaped.Bevel gears are most often mounted on shafts that are 90 degrees apart, but can be designed to work at other angles as well...

s. 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

Kate Gleason

Catherine Anselm "Kate" Gleason was an American engineer and businesswoman known both for being a revolutionary in the predominantly male field of engineering and for her philanthropy.-Early life and Gleason Works:...

 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

Mechanical engineering

Mechanical engineering is a discipline of engineering that applies the principles of physics and materials science for analysis, design, manufacturing, and maintenance of mechanical systems. It is the branch of engineering that involves the production and usage of heat and mechanical power for the...

 and sales engineering

Sales engineering

Sales engineering, often called field applications engineering, is a hybrid of engineering and sales that provides technical support to the customers of a manufacturer of products, of a distributor that sells or represents the products, or of a provider of services, such as an engineering...

.

After engineers at Packard

Packard

Packard was an American luxury-type automobile marque built by the Packard Motor Car Company of Detroit, Michigan, and later by the Studebaker-Packard Corporation of South Bend, Indiana...

 developed spiral bevel gear

Spiral bevel gear

A spiral bevel gear is a bevel gear with helical teeth. The main application of this is in a vehicle differential, where the direction of drive from the drive shaft must be turned 90 degrees to drive the wheels...

s, Gleason pioneered the machine tools to mass produce them (with automotive differentials being the primary market). Packard and Gleason settled an infringement law suit regarding Packard's patents ( and ) and Gleason's patent .

In 1927, Gleason Works again led the innovation in this market, as it was the first machine tool builder to create machine tools to cut hypoid gears (which are an advanced variant of spiral bevel gears).

Organizational structure

Gleason was a publicly traded company under the symbol 'GNE' on the New York Stock Exchange

New York Stock Exchange

The New York Stock Exchange is a stock exchange located at 11 Wall Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City, USA. It is by far the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies at 13.39 trillion as of Dec 2010...

. In December 1999, it agreed to be acquired by its chairman and chief executive, the senior management, the Gleason Foundation, and private equity firm Vestar Capital Partners

Vestar Capital Partners

Vestar Capital Partners is an American private equity firm focusing on leveraged buyout transactions in the United States, Europe and Asia.The firm, which was founded in 1988 is headquartered in New York City with offices in Boston, Massachusetts, Denver, Colorado in the US as well as Paris, Milan,...

.
There are multiple companies under the Gleason Corporation umbrella:

• The Gleason Works: The original company, located at Rochester, NY.
• Gleason-Pfauter Maschinenfabrik GmbH: Originally 'Pfauter', based in Ludwigsburg, Germany, acquired by Gleason Corporation in 1997.
• Gleason-Hurth Maschinen und Werkzeuge GmbH: Located at Munich, Germany.
• Gleason Cutting Tools: Located at Loves Park, IL
• Gleason Works (India) Private Limited: Located at Bangalore, India.
• Gleason Metrology Systems: A company specializing in Gear Metrology Products, acquired in 2005, based in Dayton, OH.
• Gleason Gear Technology (Suzhou) Co. Ltd: A 'Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise' founded by the Gleason Corporation in Jiangsu, China in 2006.