NAMES TO REMEMBER Charles Edward Taylor

‘From fixing bicycles to levitating the first aircraft.’ The legacy of Charles Edward Taylor, an American engineer who created the engine for the world’s first plane. A pioneer of design and maintenance of the original aircraft engines found himself in the industry by a fluke.

Born on 24 May 1868, in a small city of Illinois, United States, Charles Edward Taylor was a toolmaker specialising in farm machinery and bicycles. In the 1890s the Wright Brothers who owned a bicycle company, hired him as a mechanical engineer and repair specialist. As the company’s scope started to expand to the aeronautical segment, Taylor was also compelled to switch his specialty.

To create their first flyer, the Wright Brothers needed an off-the-shelf engine with at least eight horsepower, which was not available in the US at the time. The brothers decided not to look for international providers of engines. Instead, they asked Tailor to build one. He designed and built the aluminium-copper water-cooled aircraft engine in only six weeks, based partly on rough sketches provided by the Wrights. The cast aluminium block and crankcase weighed 152 pounds (69 kg) and was produced at either Miami Brass Foundry or the Buckeye Iron and Brass Works, near Dayton, Ohio. The Wrights needed an engine with at least 8 horsepower (6.0 kW ), but the engine that Taylor built produced 12.

In 1908, Taylor helped Orville build and prepare the ‘Military Flyer’ for demonstration to the US Army at Fort Myer, Virginia. On 17 September, the airplane crashed due to a shattered propeller, seriously injuring Orville and killing his passenger, Army lieutenant Thomas Selfridge.

Taylor was amongst the first to reach the crash. He helped lift Selfridge out of the wreckage, then undid Orville’s necktie and opened his shirt as doctors in the crowd pushed their way to the scene. Orville and Selfridge were taken away on stretchers. Both Taylor and Navy Lieutenant George Sweet had been scheduled to make their first flights with Orville that day, but both were bumped in order to accommodate Selfridge who had to leave town shortly for Missouri. Despite this accident, Taylor wanted to become a pilot and asked Wilbur and Orville to teach him. The Wrights, reluctant to lose Taylor’s services to the world of exhibition flying, discouraged him.

In September 1909, Taylor accompanied Wilbur, with a new Model A Flyer, to Governor’s Island, New York City.

Wilbur was to make several over-water flights at the Hudson-Fulton Celebration, demonstrating the airplane to millions of New Yorkers and showcasing the new technology of practical flight. Taylor ably assisted Wilbur, although he did not fly with him. Taylor made sure the engine worked perfectly for the daring and dangerous over-water trips. The pair also installed a watertight canoe to the Flyer’s lower wing for buoyancy just in case of an emergency landing in the Hudson River.

Taylor became a leading mechanic in the Wright Company after it was formed in 1909. When Calbraith Perry Rodgers made his trip from Long Island to California in 1911 in his newly purchased Wright aircraft, he paid Taylor $70 a week, a large sum at the time, to be his mechanic. Taylor followed the flight by train, frequently arriving at the next rendezvous before Rodgers, to make any required repairs and prepare the aircraft for the next day’s flight.

Taylor worked for the Wright-Martin Company in Dayton until 1920. He later moved to California and invested his life savings in several hundred acres of real estate near the Salton Sea, but the venture failed.