Olive Dennis

Olive Dennis died on November 5, 1957, in Baltimore, Maryland, at the age of 71.

Olive Wetzel Dennis was born on November 20, 1885, in Thurlow, Pennsylvania, and moved to Baltimore as a child. She developed an interest in engineering quite early on in life.

When she was little, her parents gave her dolls to play with. Displaying her engineering aptitude, she built houses and designed furniture for the dolls instead of sewing clothes for them as expected from a young girl. She also built toys for her brother, including a model streetcar with trolley poles and reversible seats.

She graduated from Western High School and enrolled at Goucher College from where she earned a bachelor's degree in 1908. She then went on to earn her master's degree in mathematics and astronomy from Columbia University.

After completing her master’s, Olive Dennis embarked on a teaching career and taught mathematics in a Washington vocational school for ten years. Even while working as a teacher she maintained her love for civil engineering and attended two summer sessions of engineering school at the University of Wisconsin. Then she spent a full year at Cornell University and in 1920, she became only the second woman to obtain a Civil Engineering degree from Cornell.

Initially she faced problems in finding a job as employers were reluctant to appoint a woman engineer. Undaunted, the spirited woman kept trying and approached Daniel Willard, the President of the Baltimore and Ohio (B & O) Railroad and asked for a job.

She found appointment as a draftsman in the engineering department of B & O Railroad in September 1920. Her initial duty was to design bridges. The following year, the president of the railroad observed that since half of the railway's passengers were women, it would be a practical move to appoint a woman for improving the passenger service.

Thus Olive Dennis was promoted to the newly created position of "service engineer” in 1921. During her initial years, she travelled a lot in the trains, experiencing and observing the routine problems faced by the passengers.

One of the first changes she made was to the timetable which she felt was too needlessly complicated. She simplified it and made it easier for the passengers to consult it.

Olive Dennis was a pioneering genius in the railroad industry, one of the most remarkable women engineers of her time. Over the course of her three decade long career she made rail travel more comfortable for passengers with her innovations and was the inventor of the Dennis ventilator, which was in the windows of passenger cars and could be controlled by passengers.