Josephine Webb earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Purdue University in 1940, she was the first woman to do so. She was one out of a total of five women engineering students at Purdue at the time. Mrs. Webb is considered a pioneer by the Society of Women Engineers, where she holds the status of Fellow.

 

Mrs. Webb became a Buhl Research Fellow in the Electrical Engineering Department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology for two years following her graduation from Purdue. In 1942, she joined Westinghouse Electric Corporation as a Design Engineer, where among other duties, she worked on the electrical grids for the Coulee, Hoover, and Boulder Dams. It was during Mrs. Webb’s tenure with the company that she obtained two patents for oil circuit breaker contact design, known colloquially as "switchgear."

 

In 1946, Mrs. Webb became Director of Development for the Facsimile Development Laboratory at the Alden Products Company where she designed an eighteen-inch, full newspaper-size fax machine with exceptional resolution for that time. Later, she co-founded the Webb Consulting Company with her husband, Herbert Webb, who also earned an electrical engineering degree from Purdue. They specialized in electrical-electronic measurement instrumentation, communications applications, and photographic test devices. They worked for clients as diverse as Boeing and the U.S. Bureau of Mines.

 

In addition to the consulting business, Mrs. Webb also took a position in 1977 with North Idaho College where she began the development of a Computer Center and worked on several government grants for enhancing the campus and its educational programs.

 

Born June 21st, 1918, in Niagara Falls, New York, Mrs. Webb passed away on May 4, 2017, in Seattle, Washington. She was 98.