First Flight

December 17, 1903

The day that man first achieved controlled and sustaineable powered flight.

Two dedicated and methodical brothers from Dayton, Ohio named Orville and Wilbur Wright accomplished this amazing feat with the help of a talented machinist named Charlie Taylor. There has been amazing progress in aviation during that first 99 years of powered flight. We can now fly with great safety and reliability; we can hover, fly upside down and backwards; we have built planes that fly faster than a rifle bullet and higher than our atmosphere, we can even 'fly' in space. At any one time there may be up to 60,000 people in the air over the United States.

Much of that progress in aviation happened in Southern California and especially right here in the San Fernando Valley. The Lockheed Company, Menasco, Pacific Air Motive, Marquart, Hydro Air and dozens more; along San Fernando Road from Los Angeles to Sylmar, aviation and aerospace companies were established, plus machine shops, platers and other specialty manufacturers. From Cal Tech in Pasadena to the Rocket Dyne Santa Susanna test facility in Simi Valley; from Dominquez Hills to Edwards Air Force Base, we have a long and productive history of aviation development, manufacturing and testing. Most of those businesses are gone now as are the men and women who made it all happen but it was a great run and we should be proud of our accomplishments.

During this Centennial year of flight, help us celebrate and preserve the memory of all those who made it possible, especially here in the Valley. Preserve and donate your memories.

Early Experiments

Many people had achieved gliding flight before the Wright brothers flew. As early as 1890, Clement Ader had taken off and flown his airplane named 'Eole', but its flight was very brief and it was not sustainable. Otto Lilienthal has been called the true father of aviation because he was the first to develop and control a heavier than air flying machine. Lilienthal made thousands of gliding flights and developed many of the principles of flight which ultimately made the Wright brothers achievement possible. Lilienthal was killed in 1896 when the upper wing of his biplane broke apart. Flying was a risky adventure in the early days.

Sydney Hargrave was an engineer who developed various designs of kite and airplane, many of them very successful. He believed strongly in the future of aviation and was quick to make his discoveries public in the belief that "The flying machine of the future will not be born ready made and capable of flying 1,000 miles. Like everything, it will evolve gradually….Excellence of design and execution will always defy competition." This attitude was not to be shared by the Wright brothers.

Samuel Langley was secretary of the Smithsonian Institute and spent most of his life exploring the solar system in infrared spectrum of light. Towards the end of his life he began trying to define the basic principles of flight. In 1896 Langley created a pilot-less steam powered airplane, which made the first sustained flight of over one minute in duration. Attending that event was Alexander Graham Bell who said, "No one who witnessed the extraordinary spectacle of a steam engine flying with wings in the air, like a great soaring bird, could doubt for one moment the practicability of mechanical flight." But no man had yet achieved sustained flight.

The Wright Brothers

By 1896 Wilbur and Orville Wright had studied the works of Lilienthal, Langley and others and they began a scientific program of development beginning with mastery of equilibrium in flight. The Wrights worked upstairs over their bicycle shop, making kites out of wood, cloth and piano wire. Then they shipped their creations south east by train, to Kill Devil Hill, North Carolina for testing in the steady winds over the dunes. They began in 1900 with a tethered, two winged kite. They eventually graduated to piloted gliders and by 1902 the brothers had made thousands of glides and had developed a reliable means of controlling the craft by warping the ends of the wings to affect lift. By 1903 they had piloted their glider for over 30 yards. They now only needed a powerful and reliable engine to make the dream of manned powered flight a reality. Enter Charlie Taylor.

Charlie Taylor

Charlie began by fixing bicycles and handling customers while the Wrights were busy building their gliders but eventually he was asked to machine parts for the project. He built the first wind tunnel so the Wrights could reliably test the aerodynamics of various airplane surfaces and parts. Charlie stayed and ran the business while the brothers made test after test at Kitty Hawk. In 1902 they returned with the notion that they were done with their glider studies and would now try to mate an engine to their kites. Looking around for a suitable engine, they found none so they determined to make their own.

They looked to Charlie Taylor to design and machine the parts for a four cylinder opposed engine. Charles Taylor says in an article in Colliers magazine in 1948, "We didn't make any drawings. One of us would sketch out the part we were talking about on a piece of scratch paper, and I'd spike the sketch over my bench. It took me six weeks to make that engine. The only metal working machines we had were a lathe and a drill press, run by belts from a stationary gas engine. The crankshaft was made out of a block of machine steel 6" by 31" by 15/8" thick. I traced the outline on the slab, then drilled through with the drill press until I could knock out the surplus pieces with a hammer and chisel. Then I put it is the lathe and turned it down to size and smoothness. While I was doing all this work on the engine, Will and Orv were busy upstairs working on the airframe. They asked me to make the metal parts, such as the small fittings where the wooden struts joined the spars and the truss wires were attached. There weren't any turnbuckles in the truss wires, so the fit had to be just so. It was so tight we had to force the struts into position."

"I think the hardest job Will and Orv had was with the propellers. I don't believe they were ever given enough credit for that development. They couldn't find any formula for what they needed, so they had to develop their own, and this they did in the wind tunnel. They made the propellers out of three lengths of wood, glued together at staggered intervals. Then they cut them down to the right size and shape with a hatchet and drawshave. They were good propellers."

"We never did assemble the whole machine at Dayton. There wasn't room enough in the shop. When the center section was assembled, it blocked the passage between the front and back rooms, and the boys had to go out the side door and around to the front to wait on customers." "We block-tested the motor (then) got everything crated and on the train. There was no ceremony about it, even among ourselves. The boys had been making these trips for four years, and this was the third time I had been left to run the shop. If there was any worry about the flying machine not working, they never showed it and I never felt it. Even when they got home (after the first successful flight) there was no special celebration in the shop. They were always thinking of the next thing to do; they didn't waste much time worrying about the past."

First Flight

The Wright brothers made four successful sustained flights on that day in 1903. Wilbur won the toss to take the first flight. He launched down a slight slope into a light wind and flew, but he pulled up too far on the controls of the airplane. It pointed up at a high angle and then stalled and fell down into the sand, breaking one skid and damaging the front elevator. The distance of that first 3 ½ second flight was 105 feet, just about the wingspan of a Lockheed Constellation. Orville took the next turn with more success and by the end of the day they had managed flights of 852 feet and a time of 59 seconds.

There were only 5 witnesses to that first flight and the boys made no attempt to publicise their feat. After 4 days, the Wrights packed up and went back to Dayton with little fanfare. They intended to patent 'wing warping' and ailerons as a means of flight control and to license it at a fee to others. They had purposefully conducted all their work quietly and at their own expense and they were convinced that the future use of their invention was theirs and theirs alone. In the interest of confidentiality, they only flew locally and they worked on license and business agreements to protect their work.

More Flight

News leaked out slowly and the general public was very skeptical about anyone having actually flown like a bird. By 1906, Santos-Dumont had also achieved sustained flight in France and, unlike the Wright brothers flights, his flights were witnessed and recorded by the general public. The race for flight was on and the first ever air meet at Rheims, France was only 6 years away.

In 1911 Calbraith Perry Rodgers came to Dayton to pick up his newly built Wright machine. He offered Charles $ 10 a day plus expenses to be his mechanic on a trip from Long Island to California. Charlie traveled by special train to repair the plane every night and after any mishap. The first coast-to-coast airplane crossing of the continental United States took 47 days, with 83 flying hours and 68 stopovers. Flying was not nearly so fast or easy in the early days.

Charlies wife took ill while in California and by the time he got back to east again in 1912, "I found it wasn't like old times. Wilbur had died from typhoid fever on May 30 and…the pioneering days seemed over for me." He left the Wright Brothers Airplane Company in 1919 and took a job back at the Dayton-Wright Company.

In the Wrights fervor to continue experimenting, the original Wright Flyer was abandoned. When Roy Knabenshue, America's first dirigible pilot, asked Wilbur in 1912 what he was going to do with the old Flyer, Wilbur said, "Oh, I guess we'll burn it; it's worthless." Fortunately, Roy was persuasive in his opinion that the public would find the old relic of interest and it was not destroyed. In 1916 the Flyer was taken out of storage and fixed up for its first exhibition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. It went to the Smithsonian Institute in ????

Computer simulations of its flight characteristics have indicated that it was nearly impossible to control. Very experienced modern day pilots have virtually 'crashed' the Flyer consistently. Somehow, the Wright brothers really knew the dynamics of the first airplane.

Charle traveled to Los Angeles to look for work during the Great Depression and found a little job at a factory. He had some money so he bought several hundred acres near Salton Sea. "I waited for something to happen there and nothing did." Charlie and Orville stayed in touch occasionally, until Orville died on January 30, 1948. That left Charley Taylor as the last of the original team from the first flight.

Charlie Taylor, Roy Knabenshue and several other pioneers of aviation are laid to rest in the Portal of the Folded Wings in Burbank, CA.

The Portal was dedicated to aviation history on Dec. 17, 1953 on the 50th anniversary of the Wright brother's flight; the flight that was made possible by Charles engine.