Background
Hunt was born at Candor, New York on October 13, 1841. He was the sixth child of William Walter and Elizabeth Bush (Sackett) Hunt.
(Excerpt from American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Pr...)
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Hunt was born at Candor, New York on October 13, 1841. He was the sixth child of William Walter and Elizabeth Bush (Sackett) Hunt.
He was educated at the Cortland Academy, Homer, N. Y. , in the general science course, attending the Academy until about 1861.
When he was twenty-three he went to Yorktown, Va. , for the War Department, to direct the work of caring for the negro refugees who came through the Federal lines from the Southern states. After a year of this work he was forced to return to his home because of ill health that continued for some time. In 1868 he purchased and began to operate a small coal business at West New Brighton, Staten Island. Dissatisfied with the clumsy and inefficient methods then in use for handling coal, he attempted to devise better methods, and in June 1872 patented a system of coal handling by which the coal was unloaded from cars or barges by small cars or skips which rose to inclined elevated tracks over which they traveled by gravity to all parts of the storage area. The little cars dumped automatically and were returned to the barges by the energy stored in weights which were raised by the cars during the loaded runs.
The development and manufacture of this system, which was a practical and immediate success, was carried on by the C. W. Hunt Company, established in 1871 with Hunt as president. From the engineering of coal-handling systems Hunt went into the design and construction of complete coal storage plants. His success in this work is indicated by the many large coal terminals that he constructed throughout the world. These include the coal bases of the United States Navy at Guant namo, Cuba, at Puget Sound, and at Manila; a plant at Copenhagen, Denmark; a plant for the Lehigh Coal & Iron Company at West Superior, Wis. ; and a plant for the Calumet & Hecla Company at Lake Linden, Mich.
It is said that the equipment designed by Hunt reduced the cost of handling coal to one-tenth the prior cost of handling. His methods have since been applied to materials other than coal and some of the Great Lakes ore docks are of his design. He adopted a narrow gauge for his tracks, made his car wheels with flanges on the outside, designed and built his own locomotives, all with the idea of making the most compact and efficient system possible.
He was also a pioneer in the development of the bucket conveyor systems for handling coal and ashes in power plants. When a quantity of his hoisting rope was used for driving the rolling mills of the Bay City Iron Works, he became interested in the possibility of using flexible steel cable for rope drives, and developed a flexible steel rope for this purpose. The results of his study in this connection were contained in his paper "Rope Driving", which remained for many years the best work on the subject.
(Excerpt from American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Pr...)
Hunt was an active member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the author of other papers that were presented at its meetings. He was vice-president in 1892 and president in 1898.
He was married twice: on January 24, 1868, to Frances Martha Bush and on July 1, 1889, to Katherine Humphrey. He died on Staten Island, N. Y.