Sir Charles William Feilden Hamilton OBE

Sir Charles William Feilden Hamilton OBE (1899 –1978), generally known as Bill Hamilton, was a New Zealand engineer who developed the modern jetboat, and founded the water jet manufacturing company, CWF Hamilton Ltd.

Hamilton never claimed to have invented the jet boat. He once said "I do not claim to have invented marine jet propulsion. The honour belongs to a gentleman named Archimedes, who lived some years ago." What he did was refine the design enough to produce the first useful modern jet boat.

Hamilton survived an aeroplane accident at Wellington Airport in poor conditions in 1936. The collision with the anemometer took the starboard wing off the Miles Falcon Six he was travelling in and killed pilot Malcolm "Mac" McGregor.

After a trip to England he became fascinated with motor cars and raced a Bentley. He decided to develop his own heavy machinery. He built a workshop, developed an excavator with an earth scoop and built a dam to supply water for a hydroelectric plant to supply power for domestic use and for his engineering projects, and started a manufacturing business.

In the 1950s Hamilton set out to try to build a boat that could navigate the shallow fast flowing rivers where he lived. The rivers were too shallow for propeller driven boats to navigate as the propeller would hit the river bottom.

When he took one of his early demonstration jet boats to the United States, the media scoffed when he said he planned to take it up the Colorado River, but in 1960 three Hamilton jet boats, the Kiwi, Wee Red and Dock, became the first and only boats to travel up through the Grand Canyon. The critics were silenced further when the boats went down river through the Grand Canyon to cache petrol just prior to the uprun.