The story
The 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 Gleason's invention of the first bevel gear planer, a planer with integral indexing head designed to specialize in planing bevel gears. Planers and indexing heads had been combined before, but never in the winning form factor that Gleason created specifically for gears.
Gleason's sons, James E. and Andrew C. Gleason as well as his daughter Kate Gleason were integral to the company's early success.
After engineers at Packard developed spiral bevel gears, Gleason pioneered the machine tools to mass-produce them (with automotive differentials being the primary market). Packard and Gleason settled an infringement lawsuit regarding Packard's patents (U.S. patent 725,328 and U.S. patent 1,209,682) and Gleason's patent (U.S. patent 1,325,784).
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).
From Wikipedia’s article on Gleason Corporation, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.3