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PROFILE: Charles E. Taylor

Mechanic built engine for Wright brothers' 1903 flyer

Copyright © 2005 by E A. Kral

The fourth most important news story of the 20th century was the 1903 flight of Wilbur and Orville Wright, according to a survey of journalists and scholars in February 1999.

Overlooked in this famous event is the fact that the person who built the engine for the world's first successful powered, heavier-than-air manned flight was Charles E. Taylor, a resident of Nebraska for almost two decades.

He not only built the experimental engines for all the Wright airplanes between 1903 and 1911 but also helped develop testing equipment and in 1909 the first military airplane. And he is considered the world's first aviation mechanic.

Taylor's employment at the Wright brothers' bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio began in 1901 when he was age 33, and it allowed the brothers to devote more time to their hobby of developing gliders.

He helped them construct a wind tunnel to measure aeronautical features of the glider. Then they decided to build a powered flyer, and created specifications for an eight-horsepower engine weighing no more than 180 pounds. They contacted several automobile and motor builders, none of whom could supply a suitable engine.

So Charles Taylor, using shop machinery such as a lathe, drill press, bench grinder, and hand tools, designed and built the aluminum engine with four cylinders lying horizontally and water-cooled.

Gasoline was injected by gravity from a tank attached to a bar near the upper wing of the flyer, and spark was created by two contact points in each 4-inch cylinder.

Built in six weeks in early 1903, though tested and improved in the shop for a few more months, the engine weighed almost 180 pounds, producing 12 horsepower and more than 1,000 revolutions per minute. Chains attached to sprockets connected the engine to the propellers.

The flyer had a wingspan of 40 feet, a length of 21 feet, a weight of more than 600 pounds, and a maximum speed of 30 miles per hour. The craft had runners, not wheels.

On December 17, 1903, the Wright brothers made four trial flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the longest lasting 59 seconds and covering a distance of 852 feet.

Taylor had remained at the Dayton shop during this famous event, but he assisted with other subsequent flights, including the September 1909 demonstration of their military flyer at New York before nearly one million spectators.

He also assisted with the Wright brothers' flying school near Dayton in 1910, then served as chief mechanic for a portion of Cal Rodgers' 4,000-mile transcontinental flight in 1911, followed by about a year in California, working with several pioneer aviators.

After the death of Wilbur Wright in 1912, Taylor returned to Dayton to work in Orville's laboratory until 1928, when he again relocated to California, invested in real estate, and held several jobs in the Los Angeles area.

From 1937 to 1941, he helped Henry Ford restore the shop of the Wright Cycle Company and made a duplicate of the 1903 flyer engine for preservation in Greenfield Village at Dearborn, Michigan. Afterwards, he returned to California, and worked until age 77.

Taylor's interview with editor Robert S. Hall was published in the December 25, 1948 Collier's Magazine. He was posthumously inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame at Dayton in 1965.

The Federal Aviation Administration honored Taylor in 1993 by initiating an award in his name to recognize mechanics who have been in aviation maintenance for 50 years or more.

He was also the subject of a lengthy biographical treatment in Howard DuFour, Charles E. Taylor (1868-1956): The Wright Brothers Mechanician, privately published in 1997.

Born near Cerro Gordo, Piatt County, Illinois in 1868, the youngest of three children of Willet and Elmira Gulick Taylor, he relocated to Lincoln, Nebraska by 1878, where his father worked at first in the bakery of brother-in-law Peter Gulick, then later as a traveling salesman and state weighmaster.

After the 7th grade, Charles worked for the Nebraska State Journal Company, then reportedly graduated in 1887 from Lincoln High School. After working as a surveyor in Los Angeles, he returned by the end of that year to work as a stampmaker and then a watchman and switchman, according to the Lincoln City Directory.

He then moved to Kearney, making metal house numbers from 1891 to 1893, and marrying Henrietta Webbert, whose family had previously lived in Dayton, Ohio, had been acquainted with the father of the Wright brothers, and returned there in the mid-1890s.

From 1894 to 1897, he lived in Lincoln at 921 F Street, and worked as a machinist until he and Henrietta moved to Dayton, where they raised three children. However, his wife was hospitalized from 1912 until her death in 1930.

Charles E. Taylor died in San Fernando, California in 1956, and his remains were interred at Pierce Brothers Valhalla Memorial Park in North Hollywood.

For more information, consult "900 Famous Nebraskans" on the Internet at www.nsea.org or www.beatricene.com/gagecountymuseum or www.nebpress.com.