The book about Taylor is: H. R. DuFour, P. J. Unitt, "Charles E. Taylor: 1868 - 1956" Prime Printing 1997
A detailed biography with many illustrations, blueprints facsimile copies of letters and so on. The author lectured at a Fernbank Science Center series on aviation sponsored by Lockheed Martin.
Appendix C, which is long, describes the author's replication of the 1903 engine. Taylor himself built a half-scale model in 1937 for an exhibition, paid for by Henry Ford.
Taylor also worked for Cal Rogers, the first person to fly across the U.S. in one of the most extraordinary sagas of early aviation. He flew the "Vin Fiz" a Wright 1911 Model B now in the Smithsonian. It took 49 days. There were 75 stops including 10 or 20 that would now be considered crashes. Only a few pieces of the original machine reached California, and Rogers spent 3 weeks in the hospital. He was killed two months later in another air accident.
People nowadays cannot imagine how hazardous airplanes were in the early days. I knew a WWII Japanese pilot who was trained by first generation Japanese aviators. They had two different words for landing: chakuriku (the conventional word; Chinese characters arriving + ground) and chakuboku (landing in a tree).
- Jed
