Brigantine "GRETHE"                                                              Stays'l Schooner "VALKYRIEN" by John Hanna

                                                                                                                                HANNA RESUMÉ

 John Clark Hanna

 Coos Bay, Oregon U.S.A.

 wetgen@gmail.com                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

  Mr. Hanna has been professionally engaged in the maritime, technical and industrial sectors for six decades.  For the past ten years, his mission has been focused on designing practical wave and tidal energy power take-off systems.

  In 1956, his first job was an apprentice draftsman at his family's business, Hanna Engineering Works (now Hanna Cylinders) in Chicago, IL.  In 1958, he joined the U.S. Navy where he was a crew member and Aviation Electrician on Lockheed WV-2 early warning aircraft.  He was honorably discharged in 1962.

  From 1962 to 1964, he attended Santa Monica City College and the University of Hawaii where he majored in zoology and marine sciences. He left college to help rebuild the 58-foot schooner "Valkyrien" of Honolulu. For the next two years he served as engineer on three square-rigged tall ships including the brigantine "Grethe" out of Copenhagen, Denmark".

  Mr. Hanna continued to work on sailing vessels in the late sixties and early seventies.  In 1972, he served a two year apprenticeship under Dean T. Stevens, Master Shipwright with the San Francisco Maritime Museum.  In 1974 he sailed to several atolls in the Marshall Islands, assisting Department of Energy scientists to survey the effects of atomic radiation fallout on the indigenous population  and collect flora and fauna samples.  In 1978 and 1979, he was employed by California State University, Moss Landing Marine Laboratories as Captain of their research vessel "Ed Ricketts".  Throughout the 1980s, he worked as a Coast Guard documented mariner, shipwright and certified welder.

  In 1980, Mr. Hanna founded a 501(c)(3) non profit organization named ECOM which received seed funding from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. ECOM employed University of California faculty and graduate students to assist commercial growers around Monterey Bay to develop non-chemical pest control strategies for strawberries, artichokes and Brussels sprouts. ECOM pioneered the concept of Integrated Pest Management which is now widely practiced.

  In 1990, Mr. Hanna became a certified Special Inspector for Structural Steel and Welding with the International Code Council, certification No. 0857946-X5. In 1992, he attained certification No. 92010131 with AWS (American Welding Society) as a Certified Welding Inspector. From 1990 up to 2019, Mr. Hanna was continuously engaged as a special inspector on many large, high profile, multi-million dollar projects such as: Folsom Dam repairs; fabrication of large pressure vessels for the DoD chemical weapons disposal site in Pueblo, CO; the new Human Genome Laboratory at UC Berkeley; the UC Davis Medical Records Building and the new International Terminal at the San Francisco Airport. He was also an inspector on the Golden Gate Bridge and the San Francisco/Oakland Bay Bridge.

  In 2009, Hanna Wave and Tidal Power Drives was established after he designed an innovative wave and tidal energy conversion device called the Hanna Turbine (U.S. utility patent 8,358,026).  In January of 2020, this patent was sold to a tidal energy developer in the U.K.  In 2014, a second patent was granted for a mechanical, direct-drive wave energy converter called the Hanna MultiDrive (U.S. utility patent 8,745,981).  He has also designed a low-wattage power drive, the Hanna Mono-radial Turbine, for charging batteries on small autonomous data collection buoys.  In January, 2021, a provisional patent was issued for a new type of cross current tidal turbine that harvests bi-directional flows (see links below).    

  Mr. Hanna continued to work as a certified special inspector by the American Welding Society until 2019.  He was engaged as an inspector or consultant on construction projects in the Pacific Northwest.  He was contracted to Ocean Power Technologies as Quality Assurance Inspector for the fabrication of their 'PowerBuoy'. The contract with OPT went from Dec. 2010 to August 2012.  Mr. Hanna's recent assignments have been with West Coast Contractors, Inc. of Coos Bay, OR to inspect welding at the Army Corps of Engineers dock in Coos Bay and also writing weld procedures and inspecting new construction on two large dams on the Snake River for the U.S. Dept. of Interior.  In 2016, Mr. Hanna was contracted to Fred Wahl Marine Construction, Inc. in Reedsport, Oregon to inspect structural steel and welding for a new dock and haul out basin serving large west coast commercial fishing vessels.  Additional biographical and project details can be viewed on Mr. Hanna's LinkedIn page.

                            Building the wave and tidal turbine prototype                                                                               Inspecting the SF/Oakland Bay Bridge

                         QA Inspector for Ocean Power Technologies 'PowerBuoy'                                              Another Hanna invention, the 'LightBoard'

Go to: WETGEN HOME

Go to: Hanna Subsurface Buoy

Go to: Hanna Subsurface Comparisons

Go to: Closed Loop Wave Turbine Patent

Go to:  Mono-radial Autonomous Research Buoy

Go to: MultiDrive Patent Page 

Go to:  Direct Drive PTO page

Go to: Coaxial and Tidal Patents

                                                                                                                              John Hanna's Garage

                       Over the years, skeptics have said “You’re one guy in his garage; you’re just a little fish in an ocean full of sharks".

  No, I’m like the Remora fish, shadowing the big guys, going the same place they’re headed.