Early Aviation Workshop

Early Aviation Workshop 1900s

Early Aviation Workshop 1900s


This exhibit depicts the workshop of Charles Edward Taylor (1868-1956), including a replica of the first engine he built for the Wright brothers. It also contains other artwork and memorabilia of the Beginnings Era.

Charlie Taylor worked as the machinist for the Wright brothers in their Wright Cycle Company in Dayton, Ohio. When they tasked him with creating the 12-horsepower engine to power their first flying machine, his only prior experience with a gasoline engine was an attempt to repair one in an automobile in 1901. Nevertheless, he designed and built the engine in six weeks, using only a drill press, metal lathe, and hand tools.

Taylor's pioneering career in aviation mechanics spanned more than sixty years. After the first successful flights in 1903, he did all of the preliminary engine design work for the Wrights and later taught them to build aircraft engines. He traveled with Orville to Fort Meyer, Virginia, in 1908 during test flights for the United States government and later served as Calbraith Rodgers' lead mechanic during his first transcontinental flight in 1911.

The cutaway model in this exhibit is a scale replica of the original engine that powered the Wright 1903 Flyer. The four-cylinder engine had a bore and stroke of four inches and weighed 180 pounds. It developed 12 horsepower at 1,025 revolutions per minute.

The engine was connected to a one-gallon fuel tank suspended from a wing strut and gasoline fed by gravity through a simple tube. There was no carburetor. The engine was started by priming each cylinder with a few drops of raw gas. The fuel valve was an ordinary gaslight petcock.

There were no spark plugs in the engine. Ignition spark was provided by the opening and closing of two contact points inside the cylinders. The ignition switch was an ordinary single-throw knife switch from the local hardware store. Dry batteries were used to start the engine before flight and a magneto was switched on to keep the engine firing.