Jerome Hunsaker
Today, an engineer and an airplane. The University of Houston presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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We can tie ourselves in knots, asking, “Who first flew the Atlantic?” Well, we find one remarkable answer in the year 1919 – eight years before Lindbergh. A six man crew flew a huge early flying boat, stopping in the Azores on the way to Portugal. That was a far cry from Lindberg going non-stop, New York to Paris.
But let us sidestep the old “Who was first” wars. It was an amazing feat by any measure. Just think: It was a scant decade after the Wright Brothers had first sold a workable aeroplane. But it was the Wright’s competitor, Glen Curtiss, who built it and who named it, simply, the NC-4.
The C in NC-4 stood for Curtiss, but the N stood for Navy. And here’s where today’s story begins. The Navy had created its own aircraft factory during World War One. And they’d asked a thirty-year-old lieutenant to direct its first aeroplane designs.
So: let us meet this lieutenant and see why he’d come so far, so soon. He was Jerome Hunsaker. He’d graduated at the top of his 1908 Naval Academy class. And, if we look at his next eight years, the Navy’s choice makes more sense.
Jerome Clarke Hunsaker (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
He’d earned an MS degree in naval construction at MIT. Later, he returned to do a doctorate on airplane stability. But in the years between he did something surprising. First, he translated Gustav Eiffel’s book on aviation. Yes, that’s right. The same Eiffel who built his famous tower had gone on to do wind-tunnel research on airplanes. He’d studied the underlying aerodynamics of the earliest airplane designs. MIT then brought Hunsaker back to help form a new aerodynamic research lab, and to build a pioneering wind tunnel. Which he did. Oh ... and he also completed that doctorate I mentioned.
Two images from Eiffel’s book aerodynamics
Hunsaker had, by the time the Navy hired him, absorbed most of what was known about those wondrous new flying machines. That was rare knowledge. And he now needed to propose what airplane the Navy should first build.
He saw they needed a plane that could cross waters infested by enemy submarines and which could carry out certain tasks for the Navy. The actual design would be done by engineers at the Curtiss factory. But we must not underestimate the importance of specifying a machine that could do three things: It had to satisfy the navy’s needs. It had to be airworthy. And it had to be an airplane that Curtiss could plausibly build.
Then the war ended. And so did the NC-4’s brief career. But it had set the stage for more advanced designs. And it’d marked the beginning of Hunsaker’s long role in helping to shape the evolution of American aircraft.
I’m John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where we’re interested in the way inventive minds work.
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See the Wikipedia pages about Hunsaker and about the NC_4 and about the NC airplanes in general
Jerome Clarke Hunsaker - Wikipedia
Another account of the NCs and their Atlantic crossing https://all-aero.com/2024/01/21/curtiss-nc/?utm
History of MIT’s wind tunnels.
Eiffel’s Wikipedia page and an account of his aerodynamics laboratory. Gustave Eiffel - Wikipedia
Eiffel Aerodynamics Laboratory - Association des Descendants de Gustave Eiffel
One may read Eiffel’s book, “The Resistance of the air and Aviation,” here.
The National Academy of Science offers a J.C. Hunsaker Award in Aeronautical Engineering.
This Episode first aired on August 4, 2026.