William Bushnell Stout

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William Bushnell Stout (March 16, 1880 – March 20, 1956) was an executive at the Ford Motor Company.

Bill graduated from the Mechanic Arts High School, in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1898. He then attended Hamline University, and transferred in his second year to the University of Minnesota. He then married Alma Raymond in 1906. In 1907 he became Chief Engineer for the Schurmeir Motor Truck Company and in 1912, he became automobile and aviation editor for the Chicago Tribune. In the same year he founded Aviation Age, the first aviation magazine ever published in the United States. In 1914 he became Chief Engineer of the Scripps-Booth Automobile Company. He had become General Sales Manager of the Packard Motor Car Company and in 1916, when they started an aviation division, they asked Stout to become its first Chief Engineer. In the 1920s he started the Stout Engineering Company and built the Stout Scarab car. He then began to build a number of all-metal aircraft designs, which, like the earliest aircraft designs of Andrei Tupolev in the Soviet Union, was based on the pioneering work of Hugo Junkers. In February of 1923, newspapers carried stories of the test flights of the Stout Air Sedan with Walter Lees as the pilot. In 1924 his company, the Stout Metal Airplane Company, was bought by the Ford Motor Company.

[edit] Writing

Stout self-published a small booklet (15 pp.) of poems, circa 1936. Two of the poems were in the form of letters: On Receiving Word that Stan Knauss Was Joining the Air Corps (September 18, 1918) and On Stan Becoming a Father (December 4,1930)

His autobiography, So Away I Went!, was published in 1951.