Jerome Clarke Hunsaker

Jerome Clarke Hunsaker (August 26, 1886 – September 10, 1984) was an American naval officer and aeronautical engineer, born in Creston, Iowa, and educated at the U.S. Naval Academy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His work with Gustav Eiffel outside Paris led to the first wind tunnel in the US at MIT. He was instrumental in developing a weather reporting and airway navigation. Hunsaker was also pivotal in establishing the theoretical and scientific study of aerodynamics in the United States. And he was primarily responsible for the design and construction of the Navy-Curtiss airplane (NC-4) that accomplished the first transatlantic flight (May 1919), and the first successful shipboard fighter. Later he championed lighter-than-air flight but the loss of the Navy airship he designed, the USS Akron, led to the withdrawal of federal support. His WW2 chairmanship of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was notable for favouring the development of existing aircraft designs rather than experimenting with turbojets or missile technology. Early life Jerome Hunsaker was born in Creston, Iowa, on Aug. 26,1886, the only child of Walter J. Hunsaker and Alma Lyle Clarke Hunsaker. Walter Hunsaker descended from Swiss Anabaptists who had immigrated to Philadelphia in the 1730s and moved progressively west in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Walter Hunsaker worked as a newspaper editor in Detroit, where Jerome attended public schools until 1902 when the family moved to Saginaw, Michigan, a booming industrial city on Lake Huron. Walter became editor and co-owner of the Saginaw Courier-Herald and was active in Michigan Republican Party politics. Jerome spent most of his summers at the Clarke family cottage on Lake Okoboji, a popular resort in the northwest corner of Iowa. There Jerome learned to sail and enjoyed hunting and fishing, Naval career In 1904, in the middle of his senior year of high school in Saginaw, Jerome received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. After cramming for the Academy’s entrance exams, he was admitted as a midshipman to the class of 1908. Like his classmates, he found the Academy in a state of physical and academic transition, with new accommodations in the massive Bancroft Hall and a curriculum heavy in mathematics, science, and engineering, reflecting the emergence of the burgeoning American navy of steam and steel.