Jerome C. Hunsaker and the Rise of American Aeronautics (review)

William F. Trimble has provided us with the first scholarly biography of Jerome Clarke Hunsaker (1886-1984), an American aeronautical pioneer now little remembered. Trimble's volume is well documented and well illustrated, and, though densely written, very readable. Hunsaker's contributions to aeronautics were quite diverse, both in the range of technologies to which he made significant contributions and in the varied administrative, educational, and political roles he played. His career lasted from early in the second decade of the last century through the middle of its sixth decade. Trimble's biography is admiring and detailed, and my only concern is with his frequent use of the term "heterogeneous engineer." He might just as well have said that Hunsaker was an engineer with many talents and interests.

Trimble concisely sketches Hunsaker's youth in Saginaw, Michigan, and entry into the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis. After receiving his commission in 1908, Hunsaker made the usual initial cruise, in his case aboard the USS California, an armored cruiser. Having already decided on an engineering career, he took advantage of his father's political connections to obtain a transfer to the Corps of Constructors, then the navy's technical branch. That transfer was accompanied by an order putting Hunsaker on detached service at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he met his future wife, Alice Porter Avery, and developed an interest in aeronautics.

Trimble next traces Hunsaker's early contributions to aeronautics, including his translation from the French of Gustave Eiffel's immense treatise The Resistance of the Air and Aviation in 1913 and his key role in developing the first graduate program in aeronautical engineering at MIT that same year. In 1916 he returned to regular duty in the navy, assigned to head the Aircraft Division of the Bureau of Construction. That assignment culminated three years later when an airplane he had designed, the NC-4, became the first to cross the Atlantic. In addition, Hunsaker also worked on airship (dirigible) design, and this was to become a obsession of his until the 1930s, although the navy assigned him to other tasks. Ultimately more significant and productive was his role in the introduction of aircraft carriers.

Late in 1922 Hunsaker was ordered to London for service as an assistant naval attaché for air, a position he held for almost four years. Friction with the last attaché under whom he served seems to have been the event that launched him on a thirty-year civilian career. From late 1926 until 1933 Hunsaker worked in private industry, firstly for Bell Laboratories, where, in little more than a year, he played what Trimble terms a "brief but critical" (p. 89) role in the development of early airline communications systems. Hunsaker quickly concluded, however, that Bell Labs offered him no long-term challenges. So, late in 1928 he accepted a position with the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corporation because he still believed that "the airship seemed poised to move from the experimental stage to commercial reality" (p. 114). Of course, this was never to happen, as even the airship-enthusiast Hunsaker would have to concede by 1933. (Trimble might have tried to explain this obsession with such a technical dead end a little more fully.)

It was then that Hunsaker was tapped for a position that would allow him to resume the eminence in aeronautics that he had achieved before 1922. In 1933, Karl Compton, the president of MIT, and Vannevar Bush, the institute's dean of engineering, concluded that Hunsaker was the man to revive the institute's moribund efforts in aeronautical engineering. By the time he retired from MIT he had done all that Compton and Bush could have desired when they hired him. In addition to his academic work, he had served as chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) from 1941 until...