Dr. Jerome Hunsaker
1886 - 1984
Dr. Jerome Hunsaker’s interest in aviation began early and almost came to an early end. He was born August 26, 1886, in Creston, Iowa, where he was remembered for attaching homemade sails to a wagon, careening through the streets and scaring the daylights out of horses and pedestrians. Local law enforcement officers put a hasty stop to the escapade.
In 1902 the Hunsaker family moved to Saginaw where his father, Walter, became editor of the Saginaw Courier-Herald and Jerome attended Saginaw High and became editor of the school’s yearbook. An early interest in taxidermy led him to study the flight of birds and from there to the study of aircraft. The historic first flight of the Wright Brothers in 1903 fueled his interest.
Hunsaker was appointed to the United States Naval Academy in 1905 by Congressman Joseph Fordney and graduated in 1909 with top honors. He began his naval career aboard the battleship USS California but the technical problems of the ship and her guns interested him more than its day-to-day operations. He was transferred to the navy’s construction corps and sent to MIT where he received the degree of master of science.
1912 was crucial to the young ensign: a visiting French plane, a Bleriot, caught his interest and he also spent the summer translating the classic work Resistance of the Air and Aviation by Gustave Eiffel, better known for his tower. Hunsaker found some errors in Eiffel’s calculations and began a correspondence with the great man who invited him to visit him “for as many visits as you like.” In 1913, Hunsaker did visit Eiffel in France and then went on to Germany, the center of lighter-than-air craft. Hunsaker was welcomed by the German workers, but with World War I in the offing, German officials were less than eager to let him inspect their Zeppelins.
Back at MIT, Hunsaker earned his doctorate for a study on “Dynamic Stability of Airplanes” and became an instructor of aeronautical engineering at MIT. He later said, “In the beginning, it was impossible to trace the principles of aeronautical engineering because none of us knew them. The principles had yet to be discovered.” He also built America’s first wind tunnel at MIT.
During World War I, Hunsaker became head of the Bureau of Construction and Repair in Washington. He participated in the early design of aircraft carriers and was in charge of designing the NC-4 flying boats for the navy. The planes, which were the largest airplanes in the world, were equipped with four Liberty engines. In May of 1919, three of the huge planes took off for Europe. Two were lost in a fog near Halifax and were damaged on landing but the third made it to Plymouth, England. It was the first plane to cross the Atlantic but this tremendous achievement was eclipsed by Lindberg’s solo flight seven years later. Lindberg himself paid tribute to the NC-4.
In 1923 he built the Shenandoah, a lighter-than-air craft based on the information Hunsaker had gathered when he accompanied the Naval Armistice Commission to Germany to disarm the German Zeppelins and seaplanes. The Shenandoah was wrecked in a storm but because helium had been used in its giant airbag instead of hydrogen, the ship didn’t explode and surviving crew members were able to give a detailed account of the accident. The Shenandoah might have dodged the storm if it had received adequate meteorological reports, which led Hunsaker to the study of radio communication and meteorology.
He went on to build two more dirigibles, the Akron and the Macon, which also crashed in storms. Hunsaker eventually became a vice president and director of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company, known today for its blimps.
From 1923 to 1926, Hunsaker served as assistant naval attache in London, Paris, Rome and Berlin before resigning from the navy to join the research staff of Bell Laboratories, in charge of wire and radio communications for commercial aviation. He arranged with the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company to operate a meteorological service for the San Francisco-Los Angeles airway and equipped planes with accurate and compact radio telephones. His combination of wire, radio and meteorological services was eventually accepted as standard equipment by the airlines.
In World War II, Hunsaker served as coordinator of Research and Development for the Navy Department and was also a member of the Guided Missile Executive Committee.
He was awarded the Wright Brothers Memorial Trophy, the Navy Cross, the Gold Medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society and the French Legion of Honor. He was also chosen as Saginaw High School’s Distinguished Alumnus.
In 1952, Dr. Hunsaker retired from MIT and was succeeded as chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics by his friend, General James Doolittle, who had led the first bombing raid on Tokyo in World War II. When Hunsaker died in September of 1984, General Doolittle saluted him as “one of the great people of our era…I have always looked up to him and tried to follow in his footsteps.”