Abram Reese was the sixth child of William and Elizabeth (Joseph) Reese and was born on April 21, 1829 in Llanelly, Southern Wales. He came with his parents to the United States in 1832. Some years later, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the family name was changed from Rees to Reese. William Reese was a skilled iron-worker and for five years engaged in his trade in various sections of Pennsylvania, then finally settled in Pittsburgh.
He received a few years' schooling.
In Pittsburgh Abram began working in the iron mills.
When he was about twenty-five years old he left Pittsburgh to become labor boss of the Cambria Iron Works, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where his older brother, Jacob, was employed as construction engineer and superintendent. At this mill Abram had the honor of puddling the first "heat" produced. About 1857 he gave up steel work temporarily to engage in coal mining with another brother, Isaac, but this undertaking was soon abandoned because of the meager financial returns.
In 1860 Reese returned to Pittsburgh to become manager of the Petrolite Oil Works, built by his brother Jacob, one of the first refineries in the state; but upon the completion of the Reese & Graff Iron Works (later known as the Fort Pitt Iron Works), erected by Jacob in Pittsburgh in 1862, Abram became manager there. During the Civil War he was engaged at this plant making iron armor plates for the federal government. Following the war, be became general manager of the Excelsior Iron Works in Pittsburgh and early in 1870 was made superintendent of the Vulcan Iron Works at St. Louis, Missouri. While here, in June 1871, he rolled the first rails to be made west of the Mississippi River.
His last active connection with the steel industry was in Louisville, Kentucky, where he equipped and operated a mill for rerolling metal rails. After managing this plant for some time he retired and lived in Pittsburgh until his death.
His first United States patent, granted December 20, 1859, was for a machine to roll street-railroad rails, and on Feburary 21, 1860, he received Patent No. 27, 238 for a rivet-and bolt-making machine.
With the additional improvements which he devised and patented in 1861, this machine, which made the head and stem of a bolt or rivet in one operation, was widely used for many years. During the four-year period 1867-70, he confined his attention to horseshoe-making machinery.
In this field he acquired eight patents, covering the only machine then known which rolled shaped metal in one operation. It was adapted in the course of time to the making of some fifty other shaped articles.
Between 1870 and 1890, more than twenty patents were granted Reese for a variety of inventions, including a railroad-car stove, an air brake, a machine for making corrugated iron, and machinery for manufacturing garden hoes. On August 16, 1892, he obtained Patent No. 481, 058 for his universal rolling mill. The most extensive and valuable application of this invention has been to the manufacture of steel beams; in 1929 the modern form of the Reese universal mill was the subject of a lawsuit brought by the Bethlehem Steel Company against the Carnegie Steel Company.
Reese married Mary Godwin of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on December 14, 1854. They had five children.
