Yesterday was the birthday of Otto Lilienthal, one of the people behind the creation of modern aviation. Today is the birthday of another one; Charlie Taylor. He’s not a household name like the Wright Brothers, nor is he as well known as Lilienthal. But he was just as important. Without him, the Wright Brothers wouldn’t have been able to experiment with powered flight. Charlie Taylor designed and built their engines.
Taylor was born May 24, 1868 in a log cabin in rural Illinois in the US. He never received much formal education, but showed mechanical talent early on, and became a tool maker before he was 20. When he was about 24 he moved to Dayton, Ohio and got a job with the Stoddard Manufacturing Company making farm machinery and bicycles. There was a bike shop, also in Dayton, operated by the Wrights, and Taylor went to work for them, repairing bikes. As they got more and more interested in working on airplanes, Taylor ended up running the whole shop.
Taylor’s abilities went far beyond just repairing bicycles, though. The Wrights realized in the early 1900s that if they were going to build a powered flying machine, they were going to need an engine with a higher power-to-weight ratio than anything available. Taylor said he could design and build it — and he did, in just six weeks. They needed an engine producing 8 horsepower (6 kW), and Taylor’s produced 12 (8.9 kW).
Taylor remained the mechanical brains behind the Wright brothers’ airplanes, and became the chief mechanic when they formed the Wright Company in 1909. He worked there until 1920, when he moved to California, where he lost his life savings investing in real estate. He moved back to Dayton in 1936 and worked with Orville Wright and Henry Ford when they restored the Wright family home and bike shop to Ford’s outdoor museum, Greenfield Village (you can still visit the museum).
After that, Taylor pretty much sank back into obscurity; he worked for a defense factory during WWII, but retired after a heart attack in 1955. He ended up destitute, cared for in the charity ward of the Los Angeles County Hospital until a reporter wrote about him and the aviation industry raised the money to move him into a private facility. He died the next year, exactly 8 years after Orville Wright’s death. The Federal Aviation Association maintains the Charles Taylor Master Mechanic Award in his honor, and if you get an FAA mechanic certificate, it doesn’t display the Wright brothers’ image — it has Taylor’s.
Taylor and Orville Wright attaching a canoe to the bottom of the Wright Flyer before a demonstration flight over water.
