His name can be found in the rarified atmosphere of aviation greats Glenn Curtiss, Orville Wright, Howard Hughes, Chuck Yeager and even the Apollo 11 crew who landed on the moon.
The engineering skills of Leonard S. Hobbs, a Carbon, Wyoming, native, opened the door to an East Coast job at Pratt & Whitney Aviation, which became part of the United Aircraft Corp. There he would go on to design one of the most important engines in the history of aviation and win the nation’s most prestigious award in aviation and aerospace technology — putting him on the list with other luminaries.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower handed him the honor in 1953.
In the twilight of his career, he led the engineering department at United Aircraft Corp. And his name is on a string of patents that helped transform the air industry.
“Hobbs was one of my P&W heroes,” said Harold Craig, a retired engineer at Pratt & Whitney Aviation in Hartford, Connecticut. “The engine that triggered Hobbs’ award was in production when I joined the company in ’54."
Craig said he never had the chance to “interact” with Hobbs, but his impact on aviation “was immense.”
The beginnings of Hobbs’ life could not be more grounded —with a dad trying to operate a water system in a desert and a town on its way to irrelevance.
Hobbs was born Dec. 20, 1895, in Carbon, Wyoming, which was founded in 1868 as the United Pacific Railroad laid tracks west. His father, Charles Hobbs worked in 1895 as superintendent of the water works in Carbon.
However, Carbon’s future became bleak when the Union Pacific opted to move its tracks a few miles north in 1899. Carbon today is a ghost town located 9.5 miles southwest of Medicine Bow and just more than a dozen miles north of I-80 as it rounds Elk Mountain.
In Oct. 30, 1901, Charles Hobbs was working at the freight depot in Rawlins. By 1909, the family moved to Brownsville, Texas, where the newspaper the Brownsville Herald mentioned that Hobbs’ father was working at the city water works.
College-Bound At 16
Following graduation from high school in 1912, Hobbs enrolled at the Agriculture and Mechanical University of Texas now known as Texas A & M at age 16. He thrived with the military-style training at the engineering school. Hobbs wrote an article for the Brownsville newspaper about his initiation to the college that involved being drenched with water and having his mattress and dorm room pranked.
“There are two great divisions of A & M; the engineers and the agriculturists, better known as the ‘bug hunters,’” Hobbs wrote. “These two factions are sworn rivals, and each is constantly trying to think of some way to ‘put one over’ on the others.”
Hobbs showed his engineering mettle and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1915, the youngest graduate in his class. He accepted a role as an instructor at Kansas State University and worked on a master’s degree.
When the United States entered World War I, Hobbs’ draft card showed he was called into active service on July 17, 1917, as a 2nd lieutenant in an engineering battalion. He was sent to France and Europe to fight, serving overseas from Sept. 14, 1917, until April 26, 1919. He was discharged honorably on May 6, 1919
While overseas, he was part of U.S. army engagements in Lorraine, Champagne, Aisne-Marne, and the infamous Meuse-Argonne campaign.
WWI Officer In France
While in France, he wrote his father about life near the front as well as the destruction of a village where the Germans blew up every house before leaving.
“The party that dominates Germany today has no right to dominate a bunch of cannibals in the wilds of Africa, much less a nation,” he said. “In the Christmas package I am sending two bullets, one a French and the other a German, which were picked up at a point on the lines where the French and Germans faced each other for 2 1/2 years.”
After the war, the engineer returned to Kansas State where he earned a Master of Science degree. He then took a job as an experimental engineer at McCook Field in Dayton, Ohio, a center for aviation research and development, in the early 1920s. The field would move and evolve into Patterson Field and then Wright Patterson Air Force Base today.
On Aug. 22, 1923, a social column in the Brownsville Herald announced he was home visiting his parents and leaving the “Wright airplane factory in Dayton” for a position with Stromberg Motor Devices Co. in Chicago.
There at Stromberg, he applied for his first patent on July 16, 1926, for modifications to carburetor design that would allow gas to continue to flow to aircraft engines while they operated upside down or sideways.
“My invention relates to carburetors and covers structure and arrangement particularly adaptable and useful in aircraft for ensuring proper fuel supply under all conditions of flight and operation,” he wrote on his application to the U.S. Patent Office.
B-52 Stratofortress drops boms in this undated file photo. (Getty Images) 
Carbon, Wyoming-born Leonard Hobbs and his team created the J-57 engine that was used in the B-52 bomber when it was created in the early 1950s. (Courtesy U.S. Air Force) 
A drawing of the carburetor on a Leonard Hobbs patent application. His carburetor design ensured aircraft could fly upside down or sideways without gas cutting out. (Courtesy U.S. Patent Office) 
The draft card issued to Leonard Hobbs. He was a veteran of World War I. (Courtesy Familysearch.org) 
Leonard Hobbs and Perry Pratt iun 1972. (Elmer A Sperry Award) 
B-52 performs in an Australian air show in 2015. (Getty Images) 
Pratt & Whitney J57-P-43WB engines on a B-52 bomber that served in the Vietnam War. (Getty Images)
Ride On Sikorsky Amphibian
The patent would not be awarded until 1932. Hobbs had moved to the East Coast to join Pratt & Whitney by 1928. That year he sat in the cockpit of a newly designed Sikorsky 71-foot amphibian plane that featured his company’s engines during a test on both land and water for company officials as well as local media.
The Hartford Courant reported that the pilot took off from the landing strip at 52 mph with two Pratt & Whitney engines powering the plane. The pilot directed Hobbs to pull a pump lever to bring the wheels up but forgot to tell him to shut an overhead hatch until the last minute on a water landing.
“As the ship struck the water, the propellers caught the spray and drove it into the cabin drenching Hobbs and the passenger immediately behind him,” the Hartford Courant reported on July 31, 1928. The pilot then took off again and showed the power of the engines, flew the plane on alternate single engines and then landed to applause of all on board.
In the 1930s and 40s, Hobbs’ name can be found as the inventor or various patents filed in the U.S. Patent Office. Some of the inventions were an anti-friction bearing, lubricant coolant for internal combustion engines, an oil pressure relief valve, and in 1944 his name is listed in the Patent Office with Andrew Willgoos as the inventor of a multi-row radial air-cooled aircraft engine of high-power output that is “exceptionally dependable and efficient in operation.”
The engine was actually created in 1939 and his photo along with Willgoos is on the front page under the masthead of the July 13 edition of the Hartford Courant.
“Development of a new 18-cylinder air-cooled radial engine of ‘an extremely high horsepower rating’ for fighting planes was announced today by the War Department,” the newspaper reported. “The official announcement followed completion of a 150-hour test at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio and more than 3,000 hours of operation in the builder’s laboratories.”
VP Promotion
In 1944, Hobbs was promoted to vice president of engineering at United Aircraft Corp. He was put in charge of the company’s research division as well as Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Division’s work on new power plants with his colleague and then Pratt & Whitney chief engineer Willgoos.
In 1949, Pratt & Whitney Aircraft started development of the J-57 engine with Hobbs leading the effort. An article on Nov. 13, 1953, in the Hartford Courant has Pratt & Whitney General Manager William Gwinn telling reporters that exact specifications of the engine were a secret, but the engine was “two years ahead of any other engine we know of in the turbo-jet field.”
The engine allowed an F-100 Super Sabre fighter to hit 750 mph that year.
The engine was nominated for and then chosen as the winner of the prestigious Collier Trophy which continues to be given annually by the National Aeronautic Association for the “greatest achievement in aeronautics or astronautics in America” in the preceding year.
On Dec. 17, 1953, President Eisenhower presented Hobbs with the trophy at a ceremony in Washington, D.C. for his and his company’s work on the J-57 jet engine “America’s most powerful aircraft power plant.”
“No one man can claim credit for a project like this,” Hobbs told the Meriden Record-Journal in Meriden, Connecticut on Dec. 11 prior to the ceremony. “It took the combined efforts of a great many people, mostly 1,500 Pratt & Whitney engineers.”
Craig characterizes the Collier Trophy as a significant honor then and still today.
“Hobbs and his team produced a product that stood high above that of its competition, here and abroad,” he said. “That product enabled the development and use of military and commercial airplanes that dominated the market.”
Prototype of the J 57 jet engine develped by Leonard Hobbs and his team that was used in the B-52 bomber. (National Air And Space Museum) 
An article in the Hartford Courant on Aug. 29, 1944, announces Leonard Hobbs is being promoted to vice president of engineering for United Aircraft Corporation. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
The Washington, D.C., Evening Star on Dec. 18 carried the story of President Dwight Eisenhower awarding Leonard Hobbs with the Collier Trophy. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
The Waterbury Democrat carried an article on July 13, 1939, about the new 400-horsepower engine for the military developed Leonard Hobbs and another engineer. The New York Times made the death of Leonard Hobbs its lead obituary in its Nov. 3, 1977, edition. (Courtesy Newspaper.com)
J-57 Met Needs
Craig said when he arrived at Pratt & Whitney with the J-57/JT-3 engine in production in 1954. It fit a significant need for the Air Force in several important fighter aircraft applications. He said its thrust level and reduced fuel consumption were things “the airframe industry desperately needed and which the competition had yet to achieve.”
“The JT-3 commercial variant of the J-57 was the power plant that was very widely used in the first really successful American turbojet powered commercial airplanes for the same reasons,” he said.
The engine had enough power and fuel efficiency to make truly commercially viable long distance commercial jet transportation, Craig said.
One of the applications the J-57 engine went into was the B-52 long range bomber, which became a key deterrent during the Cold War.
Hobbs would continue to lead engineering at United Aircraft until his retirement in 1958. He joined the board of directors of the company and stayed there until 1968.
Hobbs died on Nov. 1, 1977, of a cerebral hemorrhage at Hartford’s hospital. He was 80. His wife, Ida Mae, had him buried in her hometown of Virginia, Illinois.
In addition to noting his contribution to the aviation industry, The New York Times obituary on Hobbs described him as a “publicly quiet” and “gentlemanly individual” who was a technical writer with a “precise writing style” and who brought that precision to his golf game. The obituary writer quoted a company historian to describe Hobbs’ success on the course.
“He plays golf with enormous inner concentration on the theoretically perfect way of stroking a shot,” the United Aircraft Corp. historian wrote. “But somehow motor reflexes have cobbled up the result.”
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
