Rex Beisel

Rex Buren Beisel (October 24, 1893 – January 26, 1972) was an American aeronautical engineer and pioneer in the science and industry of aviation. He was the lead designer of several successful military and civilian aircraft, but is best known for designing the Second World War-era Vought F4U Corsair fighter plane.

Beisel was born on October 24, 1893, in San Jose, California, and was raised in Cumberland, Washington, a small mining community in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. His father worked as a coal miner. The family lived for a time in a tent, then a small wooden house for which Rex, in an early display of his flair for design, built a picket fence.

As a teenager, Beisel worked variously as a carpenter, store clerk, and surveyor's helper. He attended Queen Anne High School in Seattle, and worked summers at the coal mine in Cumberland as a breaker boy, mule driver, coal washer, and driver of the gas-powered locomotive which carried coal out of the mine.

In 1912 he enrolled in the University of Washington, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree, while continuing to work at the coal mine and in various other jobs. On graduating he took a civil service examination in mechanical engineering and passed with such high marks that he was immediately offered a job in the U.S. Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair,; this soon led to a job at the newly formed Bureau of Aeronautics.

Starting out as a draftsman in 1917 at $4 a day, Beisel became fascinated with aviation. With no previous aeronautic experience and little available in the way of textbooks or data, he began designing hulls, wing floats, and pontoons for seaplanes, and proved so adept at it that he soon received promotions and assignment to major projects. In November 1919 he became one of a small number of certified aeronautical engineers in the United States.

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