Charles E. Taylor in his shop. — Public Domain
2. FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON
Charles E. Taylor’s handbuilt 1903 engine… — Public Domain
…Powered the The Wright Flyer. — Public Domain
When Neil Armstrong went to the moon in July of 1969, he carried in his Personal Preference Kit (PPK) some fabric and pieces of the propeller of the original Wright Flyer. The U. S. Air Force Museum in Dayton Ohio gave Armstrong, a native son of Wapakoneta, Ohio the artifacts. Ohio rightfully claims its place in aviation history, for many of her sons and daughters have contributed to the progress of aeronautics.
Armstrong, after his Astronaut career ended, would become a professor of Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Cincinnati. In a program in Aeronautical Engineering begun in 1929 by Orville Wright. Armstrong’s professorship firmly established the program in its new broader scope — Aerospace Engineering.
Neil Armstrong grew up as a boy admiring the Wrights. He had a deep fascination with flight early in his boyhood. It was this fascination that brought Armstrong to continue mankind’s journey into the heavens.
The 66 year journey from the sands of Kitty Hawk to the fine grained soil of the lunar surface had required the contributions of many inventive souls. One such person who deserves special recognition is the man who made it possible to get off the ground in the first place by hand-building an engine light enough for the job. This is his story:
An Engine Taylor-Made for the Wright Brothers
Wilbur and Orville Wright are rightly credited with the first airplane flight, but at the Washington Flight Standards office of the Federal Aviation Agency, manager Maria Papageorgiou points out that creating the airplane was one thing – giving aircraft integrity and maintaining aircraft integrity created a whole new (largely unsung) group of heroes. She says “If it hadn’t been for the engine that Charles E. Taylor built for the Wright brothers’ aircraft, the date December 17, 1903, would have marked nothing more than a day at the beach in Kitty Hawk, N.C. It was Taylor’s engine that turned the Wright glider into the history-making Wright Flyer.”
He's called the “Father of Aircraft Maintenance,” for his work was only beginning when he handcrafted the first practical aircraft engine. According to Papageorgiou, Charlie Taylor should rightly be credited with pioneering the skills of aircraft maintenance as he maintained the integrity and airworthiness of the first series of Wright Flyers. To preserve his memory and to honor all aviation maintenance technicians (AMT), Taylor’s birthday, May 24, has been named AMT Day.
He was born in a log cabin in Illinois on May 24, 1868. The son of a hog farmer, he possessed a natural talent for working with tools and machinery, which led him to become a skilled machinist. It is said that he began his career making metal house numbers, and this enabled him to start his own shop. In 1894 he married Henrietta Webbert, and in 1898 he moved his family to Dayton, Ohio where he operated a machine shop.
It was through Henrietta’s family that Taylor met two brothers who operated a bicycle shop in Dayton. They asked him to make some parts for their bicycles. So began a relationship that would literally change the world. Eventually the Wilbur and Orville Wright would invite Charlie Taylor to work at their bicycle shop. He would take care of the shop, repairing and selling bicycles, when the brothers ‘went to the beach’ at Kitty Hawk to test their gliders.
Then came the moment when Wilbur and Orville were ready to add a motor to their machine. They wrote to several automobile companies. Only one responded, but their engine was too heavy. After the brothers tried unsuccessfully to find a manufacturer of a light engine, they turned to their own trusted machinist. They asked Charlie Taylor if he could build such an engine, and he responded “Sure!”
The Wrights were working on the design of the craft’s twin propellers and had determined that the engine could only weigh 180 pounds at maximum. It would have to deliver over eight horsepower. Taylor sketched out the design of the engine on a napkin. These three ingenious young men then crafted the ‘impossible’ engine was then worked out by the Wrights and Taylor. None of these men had been to college!
It was a relatively simple four-cylinder engine, hand crafted by Taylor in just six weeks. Beginning with a block of aluminum, Taylor drilled it out and milled it using basic shop tools. His little four-cylinder engine, with a four-inch stroke and a four-inch bore, ended up weighing just 150 pounds and delivered thirteen horsepower.
On December 17, 1903, it was Taylor’s hand-built engine that propelled the Wright Flyer on the world’s first successful powered flight. Getting off the ground was all about weight. Charles Taylor not only built the engine, but became the first ever “airplane mechanic,” supporting the Wrights’ powered flights.
The ‘Other Wright Brother’
In David McCullough’s book The Wright Brothers, he details the journey from short flights launching into the wind from a track on the beach at Kitty Hawk to a practical heavier-than-air craft capable of sustained flight. Charlie Taylor was now an indispensable member of the Wright team, accompanying them as they demonstrated the aircraft.
For the next five years, Charles E. Taylor worked with the Wrights to build a sturdier, more powerful version of the Flyer – one that had practical military and commercial applications. Initially Taylor stayed with Orville in the United States, while Wilbur went to France to demonstrate the aeroplane.
In September of 1908 Orville was demonstrating the flying machine at Fort Meyer, just across the Potomac from Washington DC. Taylor was with him, and Orville promised to take him up in the Flyer. In a fateful decision, at the last minute he decided to take up Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge instead. On that flight one of the propellers disintegrated. The plane plummeted to the ground, killing Selfridge and seriously wounding Orville Wright.
While Selfridge became the world’s first aircraft fatality, Taylor had missed a brush with death. It was he who removed the bodies of the men from the wreckage – the unconscious Orville and the deceased Selfridge. Tests at Fort Myer ceased as Orville began a long and painful recovery. Meanwhile Wilbur was over in France setting records and becoming an international sensation.
Charlie Taylor decided to pack his bags and join Wilbur in France. The boy who grew up in a log cabin on a hog farm was now using his mechanical brilliance to provide essential support for a machine that would change the world!
Contributing to Transcontinental Flight
By 1911 Taylor was training aviators at Huffman Prarie, the Wright’s flying field near Dayton, Ohio. One of these early pilots was Calbraith Perry Rodgers, who was descended from a long line of Naval heroes. When Publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst offered a prize for the first flight across the continental United States, Rogers decided to try for it in a Wright Flyer sponsored by the ‘Vin Fiz’ soft drink company. Taylor left the Wright company to become Rodgers’ mechanic.
Almost from the beginning, the attempt was fraught with problems. The engine exploded twice and the plane crashed a few times, but was repairable. Rodgers did not even carry a compass – he navigated by following railroad tracks. He got lost several times, but he refused to give up. Even when all hopes of winning the Hearst Prize were dashed, Rodgers pressed on, supported by the equally determined Taylor.
The public loved it, and the flight of the Vin Fiz ended up becoming a strong argument for the possibility of transcontinental flight. On December 10, 1911, eighty-four days after he lifted off from a racetrack in Brooklyn, New York, Rodgers rolled the Vin Fiz into the surf at Long Beach, California. Fifty-thousand expectant onlookers cheered!
In the years that followed, Taylor worked for dirigible designer Roy Knabenshue and Glen L. Martin, another pioneer in aircraft design. He returned to the Wright company in 1912, and remained with Orville Wright's laboratory when the aircraft manufacturing company was sold in 1915. In 1916 Taylor helped to restore the original Wright Flyer for exhibition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Roy Knabenshue had pleaded with Orville to save the Flyer and was eager to see it put on public display.
Orville had originally wanted to discard the plane, but Lester B. Gardener, the publisher of Aviation Magazine, had written a letter to Wright asking if the airplane could be displayed at MIT. It was Knabenshue, the balloonist, who convinced Orville that the machine was truly worth preserving. He saw it as representing a revolution in flight.
In 1928 Charlie Taylor moved to California and worked in a machine shop in Los Angeles. When the Depression hit, he was out of work and he lost money speculating in real estate. In 1937 Henry Ford wanted to preserve the memory of the invention of the airplane by moving the Wright's original bicycle shop and the house they lived in to his Greenfield Village Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. Standing alongside Thomas Alva Edison's laboratory, the museum site would be a tribute to American inventiveness.
Ford hired Taylor to work with Fred Black, the director of the project, to restore the shop. Together they located and acquired much of the original machinery and furnishings. Relying on Taylor’s memory, they recreated the home and the workplace of the pioneers of flight. The 70-year-old Taylor also built a replica of the first airplane engine for the museum. The exhibition was dedicated in 1938.
In 1941 Taylor returned to California. He corresponded regularly with Orville, hoping at some point to join him again in the laboratory. Sadly, Orville's health was declining and he died in 1948. In his last note to Taylor, he wrote; “I hope you are well and enjoying life; but that's hard to imagine when you haven't much work to do.” However, Charlie Taylor continued to work as a machinist, passing away in 1956 at the age of 88.
My Article about Charles Taylor [click to read] Appears in the September, 2025 issue of American Essence Magazine.
