Frederick Vinton Hunt
| Frederick Vinton Hunt | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
February 15, 1905 Barnesville, OH |
| Died | April 20, 1972 (aged 67) Buffalo, NY |
| Citizenship | USA |
| Fields | Acoustics, Audio engineering |
| Institutions | Harvard University |
| Alma mater | Ohio State University, Harvard University |
| Doctoral advisor | Emory Leon Chaffee, George Washington Pierce |
| Doctoral students | Leo Beranek, MA Da-You, F. Gilman Blake, J. A. Pierce, Murray Rosenberg |
| Known for | sonar |
| Notable awards | ASA Gold Medal (1969) |
Frederick Vinton Hunt (February 15, 1905 – April 21, 1972) was an inventor, a scientist and a professor at Harvard University who worked in the field of acoustic engineering.
He made significant contributions to room acoustics, regulated power supply, lightweight phonograph pickups and electronic reproduction equipment, and notably, during World War II, invented new techniques for sonar (an acronym that he invented, though the gloss was changed by others). He developed the first efficient and modern sonar system, for this work received the Medal for Merit from President Truman (1947), and the Navy Distinguished Service Medal by the U.S. Navy in 1970.
Frederick Vinton (Ted) Hunt was born in 1905 in Barnesville, Ohio. He received his B.A. and B.E.E. degrees from Ohio State University in 1924 and 1925, respectively, where he was also a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Tau Beta Pi, Sigma Xi, and Eta Kappa Nu. He received a master's degree at Harvard in 1928, and was appointed there as an Instructor in Physics and Communication Engineering. He submitted two doctoral theses; one to the Department of Physics in 1933, and one to the Engineering School in 1934. Both were accepted, but Harvard President James Bryant Conant issued a ruling that no student was allowed to receive more than one doctorate from Harvard University. Since he had already defended the Physics dissertation at the time of the ruling, Hunt accepted a doctorate in Physics. President Conant later conferred the honorary doctorate on Professor Hunt, upon which occasion Hunt joked that this was the second degree he had first earned in 1934.
Hunt's Physics dissertation, "The use of a frequency modulated source in reverberation measurements," published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in 1934, described the use of a "warble tone" to improve the reliability of reverberation time measurements in concert halls. Hunt continued this work with his first doctoral student, Leo Beranek. In 1939, Hunt, Beranek and Maa published a theory of the separate decay times of the normal modes of a rectangular room, demonstrating that the initial and asymptotic reverberant decay are governed by the non-grazing and grazing modes of the room, respectively.
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