One of our area’s prestigious colleges, Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE), is the subject of Arcadia Publishing’s latest picture book. Authored by MSOE’s Denise Gergetz and Lindsay Bastian, the text recounts the school’s origins in the city’s era of German emigration and industrial barons. The “Machine Shop of the World” needed men to build and maintain those machines—and the photographs show mostly men. MSOE’s first female instructor came aboard in 1918 (filling in for men off to war) and, judging by the pictures, women were rare on campus until recently. As the authors tell it, MSOE was ahead of the pack on computer science and was always keen on radio—hence WMSE.
