Bishop Wright had two inquisitive sons named Wilbur and Orville.
In March 1896, the Taylors moved to Dayton where Charlie worked for Stoddard Manufacture making farm equipment, and later, bicycles. Charlie met the Wright brothers by way of the building they were renting from Henrietta's uncle. This was a convenient connection- in 1898, when Charlie started his own machine shop, Wilbur and Orville would bring him special jobs, to include an oil-retaining wheel hub and a bicycle coaster brake (Whitman, 2003).
Charlie eventually sold his machine shop for profit and went to work for the Dayton Electric Company (Howard, 1987). However, he did not like his job there, so one Saturday evening, when he stopped by the Wright Bicycle shop to talk, the brothers offered him a job to work for them at eighteen dollars a week (Whitman, 2003). He accepted, at once, for several reasons: 1) The Wright brother's shop was only six blocks from where Charlie lived, 2) he could ride a bicycle home for lunch everyday, 3) he was making eight dollars a week more, and 4) he liked the Wrights a lot (Howard, 1987).
Charlie started working for the Wrights on June 15, 1901, repairing bicycles and waiting on customers. This enabled the brothers to pursue their experiments with gliders and included many trips to Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. After one of these trips, they decided they needed a more accurate means of proving their aerodynamic theories. They put Charlie to work building a wind tunnel that they had designed. The wind tunnel was a rectangular box with a fan at one end driven by the shop's natural gas engine. Charlie ground down hacksaw blades to use as balances in the tunnel (Whitman, 2003). The Wrights conducted many experiments to evaluate their theories on wings and control surfaces and, from the data collected, they began construction on their 1902 glider, with Charlie machining many of the parts ("Engines of Our", 1988).
