Hugo Junkers

Hugo Junkers was a German engineer whose early career built the technical foundations of gas-fired home heating, decades before he became known as an aircraft manufacturer. Working at the Continental Gasgesellschaft in Dessau after 1888, he patented a calorimeter for measuring the heating value of gas in 1892, winning a gold medal for it at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the following year patented a gas-fired bath boiler that heated water on demand rather than storing it, the ancestor of the modern tankless water heater. He founded Junkers and Co in 1895 to manufacture these heaters alongside gas stoves and fan heaters, and while serving as a professor of mechanical engineering at Aachen from 1897 to 1912 continued to build the heating-appliance business that made his name before turning, past the age of fifty, to the all-metal aircraft manufacturing for which he later became internationally known.