Today, we meet the man behind the first airplane
engine. The University of Houston's College of
Engineering presents this series about the machines
that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
Charlie Taylor was a
cigar-smoking, cussing machinist in Dayton, Ohio.
The abstemious Wright Brothers hired him in 1901 to
help run their bicycle shop and to do their
machining. Taylor first built the little
one-cylinder engine that drove the wind tunnel they
used to work out their ideas.
The Brothers' first airplane was coming together
nicely by 1903 -- all but the engine. Their
scientific work with gliders, with their wind
tunnel, and with airfoils had put them far ahead of
other would-be airplane makers. But they needed an
engine that weighed less than 180 pounds and
delivered at least 8 HP. The automobile makers who
answered their letters said they couldn't be
bothered with custom-built engines. So the Wrights
finally went to Charlie Taylor and said, "Let's
build our own engine."
They settled on a four cylinder in-line design --
like turn-of-the-century car engines, but with an
aluminum-alloy block. Instead of spark plugs, each
cylinder had contacts that opened and closed,
creating a spark. The valves weren't cooled, so
they ran red hot. The engine weighed 178 pounds and
put out 16 HP when it was cold. As the valves
heated up, its output dropped to 12 HP, but that
was more than enough.
That homemade engine propelled itself into history,
but it didn't take Charlie Taylor with it. He
stayed on with the Wrights until 1920 and then went
out on his own. But then his life turned sour. He
tried to start a machine shop business, and it
failed. His wife died. He lost his shirt in real
estate. When Henry Ford began an historical
reconstruction of the Wright Bicycle shop in
Dayton, he sent detectives out to find Taylor. They
located him in California earning 37 cents an hour
as a machinist at North American. The people around
him had no idea that he'd built the very first
airplane engine.
Taylor came back to work with Ford's reconstruction
until WW-II broke out. Then he vanished back into
another airplane plant. After the war, Orville
found that Taylor had suffered a heart attack and
couldn't work. He set up an $800-a-year annuity for
Taylor. Orville died before it was clear that
post-war inflation would soon reduce $800 to a
pittance. And Taylor ended up in the charity ward
of an L.A. hospital.
Charlie Taylor was finally memorialized at the
Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton, but not until
1965. Some people's inventive genius flows out of
their hands. Taylor had that kind of genius. A big
part of the Wright Brothers' accomplishment was
that they were able to call that genius forth.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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