Air Engineer

Before Detroit became the City of Automobiles, horses in its streets were frequently set snorting and rearing by an inventive small boy scudding along in a "sailing wagon." Police stopped that. Last week sedate Massachusetts Institute of Technology proudly revealed that the boy, now a bald, mustached, crisp-mannered man of 47, had accepted an offer to become head of its department of mechanical engineering.

Chiefly famed as an aircraft designer for the Navy and for Goodyear-Zeppelin Corp., of which he is vice president, Jerome Clarke Hunsaker is not new to teaching or to M.I.T. Graduated high in his class from Annapolis in 1908 he was selected the following year for the Corps of Naval Constructors and sent to M.I.T. for advanced work. Aeronautics as a science did not then exist in the U.S., but a beginning had been made abroad. A request from M.I.T. to the Navy Department, and Jerome Hunsaker was on his way to England and France where he studied wind tunnels, to Germany where he rode on a Zeppelin, asked embarrassing questions, remembered what he saw. Back in the U.S. he established M.I.T.'s first aeronautical engineering course, took charge of airplane construction & design for the Navy. During and after the war the Navy and M.I.T. continued to shuttle him back & forth; the Navy made him a Commander, M.I.T. made him a D. Sc. He designed the famed NC flying ships, one of which was the first airplane to cross the Atlantic, and the Shenandoah, first helium-filled dirigible. For three years he was Assistant Naval Attache in London, Berlin, Rome. When the Shenandoah's crash was laid to lack of weather information, Dr. Hunsaker promptly began work on meteorology and radio communications, resigned from the Navy to join the research staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories. For Goodyear-Zeppelin Corp. he, with Dr. Karl Arnstein who built 70 German dirigibles, turned out the Akron and the Macon. He will continue as consultant for Goodyear when he takes up his M.I.T. post this autumn.

To Dr. Hunsaker this year went the Daniel Guggenheim Medal for aeronautical achievement (TIME, May 22).

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