Hacker Boat Company
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| Private company | |
| Industry | Boatbuilder |
| Founded | 1908 |
| Founder | John Ludwig Hacker |
| Headquarters | Silver Bay, Lake George, New York, United States |
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Area served
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Worldwide |
| Products | Motor Boats, Runabouts, Tenders, Racers |
| Website | hackerboat.com |
Hacker-Craft is the name given to boats built by The Hacker Boat Co. It is an American company, founded in Detroit, Michigan in 1908 by John Ludwig Hacker (known as John L. Hacker or just "John L."). The company moved operations to New York State in the 1970s and continues to produce hand-built boats in Ticonderoga, New York, near Lake George, New York, with corporate offices, storage facilities and a marina lakeside in Silver Bay, New York.
John L. Hacker (1877–1961) was a naval architect and American motorboat designer. His major design and engineering accomplishments include the invention of the "V"-hull design and the floating biplane for the Wright brothers.
Hacker was born in Detroit, Michigan on May 24, 1877. For four years, while working at his fathers business as a bookkeeper, he attended night school and took a correspondence course in order to become an accredited marine designer. Once qualified (at the age of 22) he set about solving a number of problems that inhibited speed and performance in motor boats. Pleasure boats of the 1900 era were narrow, round bottomed launches that plowed through the water instead of planing over it as boats do nowadays. Hacker's first major task in boat design was to try to solve the problem of "squatting", which occurred with all the canoe-stern shaped powerboats of the 1900s. His theory was that if his boats were going to go fast, they would have to "plane" rather than plow through the water, but the tendency to plane was considered a unsafe mode that was to be avoided. Nonetheless, he built a test craft to prove his new theories—a 30-foot (9.1 m) runabout. The boat's propeller and rudder were mounted under the transom and a strut was used to position the propeller shaft. The boat also featured Hacker's revolutionary "V"-hull design, which produced stunning speed and efficiency at low horsepower.
In 1904, he designed Au Revoir, the fastest boat in the world at the time, and on August 12, 1908, building on this success, he founded the Hacker Boat Company in Detroit, upon purchasing and renaming an existing firm, the Detroit Launch and Power Company. Coincidentally, this was the same day on which the first ever Model T Ford automobile was produced by his friend, Henry Ford.
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