ADVERTISEMENT About this series Passport to Innovation is a monthly ROCNext series that gives D&C readers an exclusive, insider look of some of the area’s most innovative companies. Every month, we invite readers to join us behind the scenes as we visit some of the Rochester area's most innovative businesses. Our next visit is to Exelis Geospatial Systems on March 27. If you would like to participate or be notified of future tours, please email us.

If you took apart your car's transmission, you wouldn't see "Gleason" stamped on the gears inside. But almost certainly, the Gleason name is on the machine that made those gears, no matter what plant the vehicle came from.

The gears in the helicopters that fly law enforcement and government officials around? Most likely made on machines that aviation companies like Bell Helicopter bought from Gleason.

The gears in local wind turbines? And in your favorite NASCAR driver's car? Gleason.

Gleason Corp., the massive, city-block-long presence on University Avenue, makes the complex machines that create the modern version of what humans have used for millennia to amplify mechanical power. Their designs run the gamut, from making gears that fit in the palm of your hand to gears so large you could drive a truck through them.

Companies today need unique gears, or gears built better and more quickly than ever before. The machines to do that are elaborate, computer-driven and necessarily accurate to microscopic levels. Several Gleason innovations in its 150-year history have turned its customers' gears into high-tech, highly polished creations with worldwide reputations.

All this from a company that started as a machine shop back in 1865. Founder William Gleason, an Irish immigrant, started his business in Brown's Race, back when Brown's Race was a bustling industrial hub.

In 1904, he bought 1000 University Ave. and eventually moved the company there. At this site the company grew into an international powerhouse for gear-making machinery, faltered and found its way again.

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About this business John J. Perrotti, president and CEO Gleason Corp. is the sixth company to be featured in our Passport to Innovation series. It's noteworthy because: The company has continued to be a major player in Rochester for nearly 150 years. It created an international presence early on and in recent years survived by pulling away from ancillary activities, such as sheet metal work, painting and packaging. Honing its technology and branching out into new types of gears has kept the company relevant. Gleason Corp. The company began in 1865 as a machine shop in Brown's Race. Founder William Gleason's invention of a bevel-gear planer caused the company to grow too large for the riverfront area. Gleason moved to University Avenue in 1905. Key players: John Perrotti, CEO and president; James S. Gleason, chairman; Brian Perry, vice president of Rochester operations. Location: 1000 University Ave., Rochester. Employees: 680 locally; 2,600 worldwide. How Gleason measures success: By making even more precise machines that measure the output of its gear-making machines. Gleason in a word: Multifaceted.

Seismic shift

Gleason established an international reputation early for bevel gear technology, key to making the auto industry's rear-wheel drive systems. The bulk of that gear technology still comes out of Gleason Works in Rochester, even though the company has manufacturing plants on three continents. But perhaps Gleason's largest innovation was reinventing the company after some seismic shifts that took place 40 years ago. And it continues to change.

"In the 1970s, with the oil embargo, there was a mad scramble to switch from rear-wheel drive to front-wheel drive" to save gas, said Alan Finegan, Gleason's director of marketing. Bevel gears, which have angled teeth on top, transfer power around a corner, a function necessary for transferring power from a driveshaft to a rear axle. Front-wheel drive vehicles use cylindrical gears — a tube-shaped gear with teeth on the inside or outside. "For us, our biggest market was rear-drive auto axles," Finegan said. "All of a sudden, that market was slammed, it was reduced to a fraction of what it was."

And Gleason, then with about 3,000 employees in Rochester, was at risk of becoming a fraction of itself, too.

"That would have been a huge shock to wake up one day and your major automotive customers are saying, 'We're no longer buying, we're selling your bevel gear machines,'" said Joe T. Franklin Jr., president of the American Gear Manufacturing Association, a trade group. " I really think in terms of their corporate existence, rebuilding themselves after the front-wheel drive car proved it would be dominant, to continue growing. ... I would put that as their claim to fame."

Finegan said, "In order to sustain ourselves and grow, we had to enter the larger market of cylindrical gear technology." That was accomplished by organic and strategic moves. Gleason continues to acquire foreign companies that specialize in those types of gears and the machine tools that make them. It also purchased domestic companies, particularly in the area of gear metrology, or measurement, which helps Gleason certify the accuracy of its gear-making.

Franklin said Gleason remains at the forefront of gear technology by continually investing in its processes and products.

"It's not inventing something that didn't exist before, you're improving on something that existed, almost iota by iota," he said.

First in advanced tech

Some key changes in the way the business operates came about in the 1990s, when the company became the first company in the gear sector to use advanced technology in the assembly of its machines. That cut down the number of employees necessary to build machines. (The Rochester plant now employs about 680.) After the recession of the 2000s, Gleason also began to focus on its key business — making the gear-making machines — rather than every step of every component along the way.

So while Gleason Works used to occupy over 1 million square feet, including its own foundry, at University Avenue, the current building is now 720,000 square feet. Gleason now occupies between 400,000 and 450,000 square feet of the building. With some of the remaining space, the company created what it calls a "vendor village" on-site, spinning off the sheet-metal fabrication, electronic panel assembly, and hydraulic and power fluid operations to new companies residing in one corner of the building. In many cases, said CEO and President John J. Perrotti, the workers at these new companies used to be Gleason employees.

The factory has several major production lines. One handles machining of iron forms, often cast in Taiwan or other places, that form the central structure of their machines.

In another giant line, cranes two and three stories above the floor slide back and forth to move parts and machines to various locations as workers assemble Gleason products. More than 1,000 parts go into a machine, and each one will be used — often by a customer's personnel — to make gears before it leaves the factory to ensure it performs as specified.

Perrotti said Gleason's 150 machine models sell for between $100,000 to more than $2 million, depending on their function and size.

"In many cases, people are purchasing multiples," he said. Some 20,000 Gleason machines are churning out or measuring gears around the world now.

At the far end of this line on this day, employees from a packaging subcontractor wrap a finished machine for shipping with plastic and lumber. A trucking subcontractor mounts the wrapped machines on its flatbed and adds additional wrapping.

In a third area, workers use machines made by other companies to make components that will go into Gleason machines, such as the spindles that hold the cutting tools and the metal blanks that get made into gears.

"Spindles are something we want to keep close to the vest," Finegan said. "We think our spindles are a major contributor to accuracy."

A fourth production area has been quiet recently. Machines built by one of Gleason's German affiliates used to be used a few years ago to make gears about five feet in diameter for wind turbines. But when the economics of wind power took a tumble, so did Gleason's orders for those new gears. Always careful to avoid competing with its own customers, Gleason makes gears mostly for a few niche markets, such as motorsports.

"We do like to make some gears," Finegan said. "It does a number of things for us: It gives us the perspective of the machine user. It's good feedback on how our machines perform. It keeps our people sharp on gear technology."

Racing cars run hotter, faster and for longer periods than regular autos, so they need gears manufactured to take the additional punishment, he said. They may require custom blends of steel and special engineering.

Gleason has always been an international company. Groundbreaker Kate Gleason, the founder's daughter and right-hand woman in the company's early days, traveled abroad in the late 19th century to sell Gleason machines. The company lost one of its salesmen when the Titanic sank in 1912.

These days, though, Gleason also manufactures its wares abroad, operating plants in Germany, China, Switzerland, Japan and India, as well as in Ohio and Illinois.

"Despite all the virtual technology, there's still an advantage to be close to your customers," Perrotti said. Including sales and distribution employees, Gleason has people in 25 countries making and servicing machines, making parts, or selling machines to customers in 45 countries. In December, the company closed on another German plant, one that makes cutting tools.

"Standing still is not an option," Finegan said.

Kate Gleason's trailblazing career began at age 11

About 80 percent of Gleason Corp.'s sales are to companies outside of the United States.

This isn't just the way of the business world today; it's the way Gleason has been operating for most of its existence. And a major part of the company's international legacy rests at the feet of Kate Gleason, a historic figure in engineering and in Rochester.

The daughter of the company's founder, Gleason began working at William Gleason's side at the tender age of 11, following the death of an older half-brother whom William Gleason had relied upon. The young Kate Gleason became the company's bookkeeper in 1880, when she was just 14, and within 10 years she was its chief sales representative.

According to a company history, Gleason made her first trip abroad in 1893 at age 27, securing business from major companies in England, Scotland, France and Germany. Prone to wearing overalls in the machine shop, according to a story she told The American Magazine, Gleason took fashion advice from the likes of Susan B. Anthony and found that dressing in a more feminine and frilly manner resulted in more orders.

Contemporary Rochesterians may know that the engineering school at Rochester Institute of Technology is named for Kate Gleason; she was the first woman to gain acceptance to Cornell University's engineering program. Her other first-woman credits include first full membership in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, one of the first elected to the Rochester Chamber of Commerce and first to be elected to the Rochester Engineering Society.

Not bad for a college dropout.

Gleason left Cornell before her first year was over at the request of her father because the company was foundering; he couldn't afford to pay for her replacement. Though she later returned to Cornell, she had to drop out a second time. Nevertheless, she launched into a career among engineers.

Kate Gleason began making sales on her own at age 22 with a first trip to Ohio and eventually became a vice president and treasurer of the growing company. Among her acquaintances was Henry Ford, who erroneously credited her with the invention of the beveled gear planer, which was actually her father's landmark contribution to the world of gear manufacturing.

Apparently, friction between Kate Gleason and her younger brothers contributed to her decision to leave the family company in 1913. What followed was a rich journey in business locally and around the country. As a bankruptcy receiver in 1914, she reorganized the struggling Ingle Machine Co. of East Rochester, returning the company to solvency. In 1918, she stepped in as acting president of the First National Bank of East Rochester.

In the years that followed, she worked in real estate and construction, including the Concrest community in East Rochester, a community of mass-produced poured-concrete homes. She led rebuilding efforts in California, South Carolina and France. When she died in 1933 at the age of 67, she left an estate of more than $1.4 million, with special consideration for RIT and the Rochester Public Library, which has named its main auditorium for the business leader and philanthropist.