The Engines of the Collection

Every airplane in this museum is really two inventions sharing one airframe. The wings and the fuselage get most of the attention, but none of it leaves the ground without the engine up front, and in the 1920s and 1930s the engine was where some of the boldest entrepreneurship in American aviation took place. A machine-tool company in Cincinnati, automobile builders in Detroit, a motorcycle-engine converter in Chicago and a small shop in Holland, Michigan all believed they could build the motor that would carry the country into the air age. Some of them were right. A good many were not. We think both kinds of story are worth telling.

So in addition to collecting and displaying a very wide variety of Golden Age airplanes, the Caldwell Collection collects the aircraft engines of the period. Most of ours are doing exactly what they were built to do, powering airplanes that fly. Alongside the fleet, we have a growing collection of engines on static display, where you can step up close and see how each one was designed and built, and how differently their makers went about solving the same problem.

That matters to us more than it might seem. Many collections display their airplanes and never fly them. Even the museums that do fly tend to build their fleets around a few engine types, because a handful of engines is far easier to support than a hangar full of different ones. We understand why, and some of our engines are close relatives. But we believe it is important to keep demonstrating the technology created by entrepreneurs from literally dozens of manufacturers, the famous ones and the forgotten ones, because that variety is the real story of the Golden Age. A three-cylinder Szekely sounds nothing like a Jacobs. A Warner Scarab has to be greased by hand every few hours. A Ford Model A engine hangs on the nose of a homebuilt Pietenpol. You can read about all of that. You understand it when you hear them run.