Maude Elsa Gardner—Aeronautical Engineer Through Two World Wars
“I took the Navy, for Better or for Worse, and I intend to stick by it, (because I think it needs the work I can do.)”
—Maude Elsa Gardner
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Admitted where Amelia Earhart had been rejected, Maude Elsa Gardner became the first woman to gain acceptance into elite aeronautical engineering organizations due to her hard work and achievements. In 1936, Gardner was the first woman admitted as a full member of the Engineers Club of Dayton.
Maude Elsa Gardner organized and summarized technical information published about aviation across four languages for the Army Air Corps and US Navy. Denied a more active role in aeronautics she instead became a master of all its knowledge.
Maude Elsa Gardner – Aeronautical engineer through two world wars
By Mark Martel
Admitted where Amelia Earhart had been rejected, Maude Elsa Gardner became the first woman to gain acceptance into elite aeronautical engineering organizations due to her hard work and achievements. She translated, summarized and helped distribute an ocean of technical information about aviation, international advances and notable practitioners, but ironically was largely forgotten herself. Denied a more active role in aeronautics she instead became a master of its knowledge.
The initial idea to profile Maude Elsa Gardner as a Dayton innovator came from one solitary, cryptic fact: Gardner became the first woman accepted as a full member of the Engineers Club of Dayton, in 1936. Why had a decidedly male-only club relented and granted her membership? Was it simply due to declining membership in the depths of the Great Depression? Or had she succeeded on her own merits? Many lines of research (see sidebar) have uncovered a lifetime of significant accomplishments in the face of hardship and challenge.
Elsa Gardner, as she preferred to be called, would become a self-rated expert in aeronautical research and military intelligence, besides working in metallurgy and research and development. Translating and summarizing technical reports from German, Italian, French and English, in addition to her working knowledge of Latin and Greek, she alerted fellow aeronautical engineers to the latest overseas progress when European fascism was on the rise, during WWII, and in the subsequent Cold War. And though an outsider by gender, she worked to help other engineers connect and network professionally.
But to succeed, Gardner would have to accommodate physical “lameness,” pursue her studies across two decades, master five languages besides English, and persevere against a society that was often not ready to accept a female engineer. One early employer had let her go after he explained, “What would the machinists in the shops who read our magazine think if they knew we had a woman on our staff?”
Maude Elsa Gardner was born January 9, 1894 in Brooklyn, New York.
According to the 1900 U.S. Census, the Gardner family lived at 309 Quincy Street in Brooklyn, New York. Parents Herbert, age 28, and Maude, age 27, had been married 7 years. Younger brother Henry R., was a year old. Herbert’s father hailed from Ireland, and Elsa’s maternal grandparents were Canadian.
The Gardners rented their home and could afford a live-in 17-year-old servant, Kate Gallagher, from England. But all was not well for six-year-old Elsa.
“I limp from shortening of right leg due to hip joint disease at age of six, and lack of development of the leg while I was growing. This lameness has never interfered with my engineering work in the factory, engine lab, or wind tunnel. I was cured 30 or more years ago, and have never been troubled since.”
—Maude Elsa Gardner in 1945
This reply to a job application probably understates the reality. Before antibiotics, acute osteomyelitis in children could require multiple hip operations and long periods confined to bed. Such extreme physical privations may have helped stimulate Gardner’s intellectual interest in math and languages.
1910: At 16 years old, Elsa and her family now lived at 1917 86th Street in Brooklyn. Two more children had been born since the last census. Her father, a draperies merchant, could afford college tuition even for his daughters. From Elsa’s statement above, she finally overcame hip disease sometime before going off to university in 1912.
By 1920, three children were living at home. Elsa, now age 25 and single, was listed as a M. Engineer (assuming Mechanical Engineer) in a Machine (?) Company. Sister, Katheryn was 19 and a “Scholar” in college. Brother Allison, age 13, was a “Pupil” in High School. Henry had shipped off to France.
Gardner’s civilian records from the National Archives continue the story.
“During periods of employment attended college or was living at home. During times of depression, it was very hard for a woman engineer to get an engineering position, and I had to be content with what I could get.”
In1916 Gardner earned a B.A. from St. Lawrence College in upstate New York, specialized in mathematics. After college she returned to live at home in Brooklyn, working as a bookkeeper and statistician until World War One intervened.
At the British Ministry of Munitions of War in U.S. (in New York City) she found work as a Gauge Examiner. “Was taught British methods of measuring screw-thread and flat gages used in manufacture of munitions for British and French airplanes…I used new types of machines introduced by the British, such as the lead tester, as well as micrometers and vernier calipers.”
The manpower shortage opened up job opportunities for women and minorities temporarily. Some found the factory work liberating and lucrative, while others found it toxic, injurious and even deadly. In Britain, Canada and the U.S. women gained the vote shortly after WWI, partly due to their war involvement.
Working with explosives could be deadly on a massive scale. The July, 1916 “Black Tom Blast” in New York harbor was the largest explosion ever in the U.S. and was felt 100 miles away. 2,000 tons of munitions blew up while awaiting shipment for World War I. Five months later 37 people were killed in a British munitions factory. And when two ships collided in December 1917, Halifax, Nova Scotia became the site of the largest man-made explosion prior to the atom bombing of Hiroshima.
“Transferred at request of Navy [to Bliss Company Torpedo Works] to bring production up to standard. I was responsible for all the gages used in the production of torpedoes, some 84 different sized thread gages… When production of torpedoes ceased, I was transferred to the drafting department where I laid out a new course for the torpedo testing range at Sag Harbor when range was increased. Also did some drafting.”
Gardner continued her quest for an engineering degree with night school at New York University and Pratt Institute, a summer in Ann Arbor and finally with a year’s scholarship to M.I.T., ending her formal education finally in 1933, 21 years after first entering college.
After WWI, Gardner worked a stretch at Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut before growing homesick. Other jobs followed with printers and typesetters. Then she landed a position with the Wright Aeronautical Corp. in Paterson, New Jersey. As Assistant to Test Engineers, she “computed results of tests and drawing up of instructions for the assembly and disassembly of the Wright Whirlwind engine.” This was the first major radial engine, an outgrowth of work from Dayton’s McCook Field and a corporate descendant of the original Wright brothers company. (In those days a computer was a person doing math by hand, not an electronic machine.)
Her next position almost doubled her income and prefigured her government career. At the American Society of the Mechanical Engineers in Manhattan she “started card index system and had charge of all the aeronautical, mechanical and automotive engineering subjects, writing abstracts and reviewing all technical literature on these subjects in French and English which came into the Engineering Societies Libraries. I was entirely responsible for this work, as well as for the subject, and author classifications.”
Her stated reason for leaving: “sister died suddenly.” The Great Depression had started a few months prior. “I was supposed to start an aeronautical engineering library for [Bendix Research Corp.] and Eclipse Aviation Corp., but before I got very far with it, the appropriation gave out due to the depression and Mr. Bendix’ need for cutting out everything he could.”
In the early 1930s Gardner held a series of jobs as bibliographer, statistician, and civil engineering Project Examiner. She also held an ongoing side job for Aero Digest Magazine between 1930 to 1936 as a contributing editor. “Wrote the “Digest of Foreign Technical Literature” for each issue of the magazine. This consisted of abstracts of French, German, and Italian as well as English publications, selected because of their importance to aeronautical engineers. I also made an index of the magazine. This work was done at home and at the same time I was holding other positions listed below or attending engineering college.”
By 1930 Gardner boarded in Manhattan, at the now-historic Panhellenic Tower. It was safe and affordable housing for young single women who belonged to “national, Greek-letter sororities.”
After a year’s scholarship at M.I.T. to complete her engineering course work, Gardner found the opportunity to turn her Aero Digest side work into a fulltime career, though she was unable to finalize her degree. By comparison, six women received degrees from MIT in aeronautical engineering between 1925 and 1960.
At Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, Gardner became Assistant Technical Review Editor “and sole writer of the “Technical Data Digest,” a 40-to-50 page semi-monthly publication containing abstracts of articles or reports of French, German, or Italian, as well as English and American sources, and which I considered of interest to engineers at Wright Fld. It was distributed throughout the Air Corps as well as to other Government agencies. Without revision it was republished in the Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences. As a tribute to my work, the Institute Of the Aeronautical Sciences [IAS] made me its first woman member.”
The shared knowledge helped US military and commercial sectors keep up with the latest developments and stay in sync with one other.
Tom Crouch, Senior Curator in Aeronautics at the Smithsonian Institution, noted that the IAS “had been opposed to women entering the organization since its founding in 1933. They had a membership category for pilots, but famously excluded Amelia Earhart. In the beginning they were quite the elitist group.”
Instead the IAS invited Elsa Gardner to join.
Her acceptance made the front page of the Dayton Daily News in 1939, which also noted her membership in the executive council of the International Women’s Engineering society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Society of American Military Engineers.
It may have helped that Gardner also wrote the “Index of Technical Orders & Technical Notes” of the Bureau of Aeronautics, 175 pages of 6-pt. type. “I originated this and issue it twice a year.” Additionally, she wrote an index to the Bureau’s Manual. And finally, she started the Dayton branch of the IAS…at the largest US air base focused on aeronautical research. The Institute evolved into today's AIAA, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Gardner received commendations from the Chief of the Air Corps, then-Major General Hap Arnold. The letter hung framed in her apartment in downtown Dayton’s Biltmore Hotel. From there she rode the bus the six miles to the base or walked the single block from her apartment to the Engineers Club. Her five years in Dayton would prove her longest stretch away from the east coast and easier access to family.
Gardner had already joined the Engineers Club in 1936, the first woman admitted as a full member. (Chemical engineer and lawyer Gertrude Bucher had joined as a junior member in 1929.) But the reason for Gardner’s acceptance remains unknown.
Coming late to the fight, the US ended World War One ranked fourteenth in military aviation. But research and development at Dayton’s first military airfield helped move the US to first place, as chronicled in Mary Ann Johnson’s book McCook Field, 1917-1927. This was partly due to McCook personnel publishing their results and acting as a clearinghouse for information between the military and industry. When McCook closed, much of that work moved to the new Wright Field east of Dayton, where a decade later Elsa Gardner was to continue the work of summarizing and publishing the latest technical info in the field, with the addition of works published in Europe.
Writer Daniel Hoffman, who later served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1973–1974, was assigned as Gardner’s replacement in 1942. A description of his memoir Zone of the Interior notes,
“…he was given more responsibility than he has ever held since: directing the AAF Technical Data Digest, an abstracts journal that covered every phase of aeronautical research and development relevant to the Army Air Force. It was sent to air bases around the world, military contractors, and all Allied air attaches. This is a hitherto untold report of how the AAF retrieved and distributed essential technical data before the invention of computerized information processing. “
In March of 1941, with US involvement in World War Two imminent, Gardner applied to perform similar work for the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. Finally her two decades of higher education were officially recognized. “When I transferred from the U.S. Army Air Corps to the Navy Dept., I was rated an Assoc. Aeronautical Engineer on my education and experience record.” She was willing to be appointed anywhere inside or outside the US; she ended up in Washington D.C., closer to family. Her mother shared her apartment there at times.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Navy’s “ill-preparedness” had made Elsa Gardner literally sick to the stomach. Ignoring her doctor’s orders of bed rest for a stomach ulcer, she returned to duty immediately. Work was piled on and she did it “uncomplainingly… even though it meant hours and hours of overtime.
“Instead of going with an aircraft company which told me to name my own salary, or staying with the Air Corps as they wanted me to, I took the Navy, for Better or for Worse, and I intend to stick by it, (because I think it needs the work I can do)…” she quietly bragged. She was one of only two woman aeronautical engineers in the Navy.
Her salary as an Associate Aero Engineer was $3200—$200 more than her best pay up to that point, which she had earned a dozen years prior, before the Depression. The work was similar to her Air Corps duties. “Head, Indexing and Abstracting Unit with complete responsibility for the evaluation of engineering reports and technical publications covering all phases of aeronautical engineering and a Bureau authority on engg. reports and data. I am responsible for making detailed studies on any phase of aero. engg. research and development. Write TO-TN Index. Locate new sources of information. Compiles bibliographies.”
Months later a United Press profile of Gardner appeared in Pennsylvania’s Charleroi Mail, the Lowell, Massachusetts Sun and was syndicated to many other newspapers. (See transcript.) A second woman twenty years her junior is mentioned in the article as working toward her degree in aeronautical research. Once again wartime was creating new opportunities for women. But for Elsa Gardner, now nearing age 50, her career seemed to reach peak altitude, though it would maintain cruising speed for another two decades.
A 1948 letter from N.A.C.A., the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and forerunner of NASA, thanked her for publication of “Significant American and International Awards in Aviation.”
On a 1950 questionnaire modeled after an “American Men of Science” survey, Gardner summarized her occupational specialties: In Metallurgical Intelligence she had 30 years of limited experience. For R&D intelligence, 4 years of limited experience. In Aeronautical Research and Military Intelligence she listed 14 years with limited experience for research, but extensive experience for design, development, and/or testing. Under hobbies she felt she was very good at duplicate contract bridge and rated herself a fair violinist.
In 1955, MIT’s Aeronautical Engineering Library called on Gardner’s expertise when they requested two reports she had written. In a sense her alma mater was paying delayed tribute.
The 1950s also brought several Superior Accomplishment Awards, travel to several conferences and further step increases in pay. When the Navy reorganized in 1960 she found herself in the Bureau of Naval Weapons. But the end was near. At the end of October, 1962 Maude Elsa Gardner retired from her sickbed at Doctors Hospital, after 27 years of government service. Apparently she never recovered, for she died from cancer not four months later in February, 1963, at age 69.
Elsa Gardner is remembered in the various sources listed on the Timeline/C.V., as well as in the many publications she authored. In 2005 Gardner received an award from the City of Dayton for her achievement as the first woman member of the IAS, which listed her as an aeronautical engineer at Wright Field from 1936-1941. Her Washington Post obituary includes mention of another letter of commendation—from King George V for her WWI service.
Admitted where Amelia Earhart had been rejected, Maude Elsa Gardner became the first woman to gain acceptance into elite aeronautical engineering organizations due to her hard work and achievements. She translated, summarized and helped distribute an ocean of technical information about aviation, international advances and notable practitioners, but ironically was largely forgotten herself. Denied a more active role in aeronautics she instead became a master of its knowledge.
The initial idea to profile Maude Elsa Gardner as a Dayton innovator came from one solitary, cryptic fact: Gardner became the first woman accepted as a full member of the Engineers Club of Dayton, in 1936. Why had a decidedly male-only club relented and granted her membership? Was it simply due to declining membership in the depths of the Great Depression? Or had she succeeded on her own merits? Many lines of research (see sidebar) have uncovered a lifetime of significant accomplishments in the face of hardship and challenge.
Elsa Gardner, as she preferred to be called, would become a self-rated expert in aeronautical research and military intelligence, besides working in metallurgy and research and development. Translating and summarizing technical reports from German, Italian, French and English, in addition to her working knowledge of Latin and Greek, she alerted fellow aeronautical engineers to the latest overseas progress when European fascism was on the rise, during WWII, and in the subsequent Cold War. And though an outsider by gender, she worked to help other engineers connect and network professionally.
But to succeed, Gardner would have to accommodate physical “lameness,” pursue her studies across two decades, master five languages besides English, and persevere against a society that was often not ready to accept a female engineer. One early employer had let her go after he explained, “What would the machinists in the shops who read our magazine think if they knew we had a woman on our staff?”
Maude Elsa Gardner was born January 9, 1894 in Brooklyn, New York.
According to the 1900 U.S. Census, the Gardner family lived at 309 Quincy Street in Brooklyn, New York. Parents Herbert, age 28, and Maude, age 27, had been married 7 years. Younger brother Henry R., was a year old. Herbert’s father hailed from Ireland, and Elsa’s maternal grandparents were Canadian.
The Gardners rented their home and could afford a live-in 17-year-old servant, Kate Gallagher, from England. But all was not well for six-year-old Elsa.
“I limp from shortening of right leg due to hip joint disease at age of six, and lack of development of the leg while I was growing. This lameness has never interfered with my engineering work in the factory, engine lab, or wind tunnel. I was cured 30 or more years ago, and have never been troubled since.”
—Maude Elsa Gardner in 1945
This reply to a job application probably understates the reality. Before antibiotics, acute osteomyelitis in children could require multiple hip operations and long periods confined to bed. Such extreme physical privations may have helped stimulate Gardner’s intellectual interest in math and languages.
1910: At 16 years old, Elsa and her family now lived at 1917 86th Street in Brooklyn. Two more children had been born since the last census. Her father, a draperies merchant, could afford college tuition even for his daughters. From Elsa’s statement above, she finally overcame hip disease sometime before going off to university in 1912.
By 1920, three children were living at home. Elsa, now age 25 and single, was listed as a M. Engineer (assuming Mechanical Engineer) in a Machine (?) Company. Sister, Katheryn was 19 and a “Scholar” in college. Brother Allison, age 13, was a “Pupil” in High School. Henry had shipped off to France.
Gardner’s civilian records from the National Archives continue the story.
“During periods of employment attended college or was living at home. During times of depression, it was very hard for a woman engineer to get an engineering position, and I had to be content with what I could get.”
In1916 Gardner earned a B.A. from St. Lawrence College in upstate New York, specialized in mathematics. After college she returned to live at home in Brooklyn, working as a bookkeeper and statistician until World War One intervened.
At the British Ministry of Munitions of War in U.S. (in New York City) she found work as a Gauge Examiner. “Was taught British methods of measuring screw-thread and flat gages used in manufacture of munitions for British and French airplanes…I used new types of machines introduced by the British, such as the lead tester, as well as micrometers and vernier calipers.”
The manpower shortage opened up job opportunities for women and minorities temporarily. Some found the factory work liberating and lucrative, while others found it toxic, injurious and even deadly. In Britain, Canada and the U.S. women gained the vote shortly after WWI, partly due to their war involvement.
Working with explosives could be deadly on a massive scale. The July, 1916 “Black Tom Blast” in New York harbor was the largest explosion ever in the U.S. and was felt 100 miles away. 2,000 tons of munitions blew up while awaiting shipment for World War I. Five months later 37 people were killed in a British munitions factory. And when two ships collided in December 1917, Halifax, Nova Scotia became the site of the largest man-made explosion prior to the atom bombing of Hiroshima.
“Transferred at request of Navy [to Bliss Company Torpedo Works] to bring production up to standard. I was responsible for all the gages used in the production of torpedoes, some 84 different sized thread gages… When production of torpedoes ceased, I was transferred to the drafting department where I laid out a new course for the torpedo testing range at Sag Harbor when range was increased. Also did some drafting.”
Gardner continued her quest for an engineering degree with night school at New York University and Pratt Institute, a summer in Ann Arbor and finally with a year’s scholarship to M.I.T., ending her formal education finally in 1933, 21 years after first entering college.
After WWI, Gardner worked a stretch at Pratt & Whitney in Connecticut before growing homesick. Other jobs followed with printers and typesetters. Then she landed a position with the Wright Aeronautical Corp. in Paterson, New Jersey. As Assistant to Test Engineers, she “computed results of tests and drawing up of instructions for the assembly and disassembly of the Wright Whirlwind engine.” This was the first major radial engine, an outgrowth of work from Dayton’s McCook Field and a corporate descendant of the original Wright brothers company. (In those days a computer was a person doing math by hand, not an electronic machine.)
Her next position almost doubled her income and prefigured her government career. At the American Society of the Mechanical Engineers in Manhattan she “started card index system and had charge of all the aeronautical, mechanical and automotive engineering subjects, writing abstracts and reviewing all technical literature on these subjects in French and English which came into the Engineering Societies Libraries. I was entirely responsible for this work, as well as for the subject, and author classifications.”
Her stated reason for leaving: “sister died suddenly.” The Great Depression had started a few months prior. “I was supposed to start an aeronautical engineering library for [Bendix Research Corp.] and Eclipse Aviation Corp., but before I got very far with it, the appropriation gave out due to the depression and Mr. Bendix’ need for cutting out everything he could.”
In the early 1930s Gardner held a series of jobs as bibliographer, statistician, and civil engineering Project Examiner. She also held an ongoing side job for Aero Digest Magazine between 1930 to 1936 as a contributing editor. “Wrote the “Digest of Foreign Technical Literature” for each issue of the magazine. This consisted of abstracts of French, German, and Italian as well as English publications, selected because of their importance to aeronautical engineers. I also made an index of the magazine. This work was done at home and at the same time I was holding other positions listed below or attending engineering college.”
By 1930 Gardner boarded in Manhattan, at the now-historic Panhellenic Tower. It was safe and affordable housing for young single women who belonged to “national, Greek-letter sororities.”
After a year’s scholarship at M.I.T. to complete her engineering course work, Gardner found the opportunity to turn her Aero Digest side work into a fulltime career, though she was unable to finalize her degree. By comparison, six women received degrees from MIT in aeronautical engineering between 1925 and 1960.
At Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio, Gardner became Assistant Technical Review Editor “and sole writer of the “Technical Data Digest,” a 40-to-50 page semi-monthly publication containing abstracts of articles or reports of French, German, or Italian, as well as English and American sources, and which I considered of interest to engineers at Wright Fld. It was distributed throughout the Air Corps as well as to other Government agencies. Without revision it was republished in the Journal of the Aeronautical Sciences. As a tribute to my work, the Institute Of the Aeronautical Sciences [IAS] made me its first woman member.”
The shared knowledge helped US military and commercial sectors keep up with the latest developments and stay in sync with one other.
Tom Crouch, Senior Curator in Aeronautics at the Smithsonian Institution, noted that the IAS “had been opposed to women entering the organization since its founding in 1933. They had a membership category for pilots, but famously excluded Amelia Earhart. In the beginning they were quite the elitist group.”
Instead the IAS invited Elsa Gardner to join.
Her acceptance made the front page of the Dayton Daily News in 1939, which also noted her membership in the executive council of the International Women’s Engineering society, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Society of American Military Engineers.
It may have helped that Gardner also wrote the “Index of Technical Orders & Technical Notes” of the Bureau of Aeronautics, 175 pages of 6-pt. type. “I originated this and issue it twice a year.” Additionally, she wrote an index to the Bureau’s Manual. And finally, she started the Dayton branch of the IAS…at the largest US air base focused on aeronautical research. The Institute evolved into today's AIAA, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
Gardner received commendations from the Chief of the Air Corps, then-Major General Hap Arnold. The letter hung framed in her apartment in downtown Dayton’s Biltmore Hotel. From there she rode the bus the six miles to the base or walked the single block from her apartment to the Engineers Club. Her five years in Dayton would prove her longest stretch away from the east coast and easier access to family.
Gardner had already joined the Engineers Club in 1936, the first woman admitted as a full member. (Chemical engineer and lawyer Gertrude Bucher had joined as a junior member in 1929.) But the reason for Gardner’s acceptance remains unknown.
Coming late to the fight, the US ended World War One ranked fourteenth in military aviation. But research and development at Dayton’s first military airfield helped move the US to first place, as chronicled in Mary Ann Johnson’s book McCook Field, 1917-1927. This was partly due to McCook personnel publishing their results and acting as a clearinghouse for information between the military and industry. When McCook closed, much of that work moved to the new Wright Field east of Dayton, where a decade later Elsa Gardner was to continue the work of summarizing and publishing the latest technical info in the field, with the addition of works published in Europe.
Writer Daniel Hoffman, who later served as Poet Laureate of the United States in 1973–1974, was assigned as Gardner’s replacement in 1942. A description of his memoir Zone of the Interior notes,
“…he was given more responsibility than he has ever held since: directing the AAF Technical Data Digest, an abstracts journal that covered every phase of aeronautical research and development relevant to the Army Air Force. It was sent to air bases around the world, military contractors, and all Allied air attaches. This is a hitherto untold report of how the AAF retrieved and distributed essential technical data before the invention of computerized information processing. “
In March of 1941, with US involvement in World War Two imminent, Gardner applied to perform similar work for the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics. Finally her two decades of higher education were officially recognized. “When I transferred from the U.S. Army Air Corps to the Navy Dept., I was rated an Assoc. Aeronautical Engineer on my education and experience record.” She was willing to be appointed anywhere inside or outside the US; she ended up in Washington D.C., closer to family. Her mother shared her apartment there at times.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Navy’s “ill-preparedness” had made Elsa Gardner literally sick to the stomach. Ignoring her doctor’s orders of bed rest for a stomach ulcer, she returned to duty immediately. Work was piled on and she did it “uncomplainingly… even though it meant hours and hours of overtime.
“Instead of going with an aircraft company which told me to name my own salary, or staying with the Air Corps as they wanted me to, I took the Navy, for Better or for Worse, and I intend to stick by it, (because I think it needs the work I can do)…” she quietly bragged. She was one of only two woman aeronautical engineers in the Navy.
Her salary as an Associate Aero Engineer was $3200—$200 more than her best pay up to that point, which she had earned a dozen years prior, before the Depression. The work was similar to her Air Corps duties. “Head, Indexing and Abstracting Unit with complete responsibility for the evaluation of engineering reports and technical publications covering all phases of aeronautical engineering and a Bureau authority on engg. reports and data. I am responsible for making detailed studies on any phase of aero. engg. research and development. Write TO-TN Index. Locate new sources of information. Compiles bibliographies.”
Months later a United Press profile of Gardner appeared in Pennsylvania’s Charleroi Mail, the Lowell, Massachusetts Sun and was syndicated to many other newspapers. (See transcript.) A second woman twenty years her junior is mentioned in the article as working toward her degree in aeronautical research. Once again wartime was creating new opportunities for women. But for Elsa Gardner, now nearing age 50, her career seemed to reach peak altitude, though it would maintain cruising speed for another two decades.
A 1948 letter from N.A.C.A., the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and forerunner of NASA, thanked her for publication of “Significant American and International Awards in Aviation.”
On a 1950 questionnaire modeled after an “American Men of Science” survey, Gardner summarized her occupational specialties: In Metallurgical Intelligence she had 30 years of limited experience. For R&D intelligence, 4 years of limited experience. In Aeronautical Research and Military Intelligence she listed 14 years with limited experience for research, but extensive experience for design, development, and/or testing. Under hobbies she felt she was very good at duplicate contract bridge and rated herself a fair violinist.
In 1955, MIT’s Aeronautical Engineering Library called on Gardner’s expertise when they requested two reports she had written. In a sense her alma mater was paying delayed tribute.
The 1950s also brought several Superior Accomplishment Awards, travel to several conferences and further step increases in pay. When the Navy reorganized in 1960 she found herself in the Bureau of Naval Weapons. But the end was near. At the end of October, 1962 Maude Elsa Gardner retired from her sickbed at Doctors Hospital, after 27 years of government service. Apparently she never recovered, for she died from cancer not four months later in February, 1963, at age 69.
Elsa Gardner is remembered in the various sources listed on the Timeline/C.V., as well as in the many publications she authored. In 2005 Gardner received an award from the City of Dayton for her achievement as the first woman member of the IAS, which listed her as an aeronautical engineer at Wright Field from 1936-1941. Her Washington Post obituary includes mention of another letter of commendation—from King George V for her WWI service.
The Search for Elsa Gardner
Writing about Maude Elsa Gardner’s career in navigating through libraries of technical information has been a bibliographic detective story in itself. Scattered records at first held only hints and snippets of information. We first considered profiling Gardner as a Dayton innovator based on the solitary fact that she had become the first woman admitted as a full member of the Engineers Club of Dayton in 1936.
There had to be more to the story, reasons why a decidedly male-only club relented and granted her membership. Had it been simply due to declining membership in the depths of the Great Depression? Or were there more substantial reasons based on her merits?
There had to be more to the story, reasons why a decidedly male-only club relented and granted her membership. Had it been simply due to declining membership in the depths of the Great Depression? Or were there more substantial reasons based on her merits?
Dayton Innovation Legacy is a multimedia website and educational resource about Engineers Club of Dayton members who represent a living history of innovation for over 100 years. Dayton Innovation Legacy was made possible in part by the Ohio Humanities Council, a State affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. |