D. Gilman Taylor

 

(1902 - 1981) Taylor was the second graduate engineer employed by the Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company and spent the major portion of his 43-year career at Honeywell inventing, designing and developing products associated with it’s temperature control business. He received 62 U.S. patents in the fields of temperature control and aircraft instrumentation and control, either as the sole or joint inventor. Forty-four of his patents were in Honeywell’s temperature control business. Of the remaining inventions, most were related to instrumentation and control for aircraft. Among them were a very-high-acceleration motor that became the basis for a new Honeywell division, and a gyroscopic control that developed into the gyroscope that went with the astronauts to the moon. It is difficult to single out one invention over another that Taylor made over his long career with Honeywell, since practically all of his inventions were incorporated in products that have formed the core of Honeywell’s temperature control business and which products have been marketed around the world. Because of the strength of Honeywell’s temperature control business, which embodied in it so many of Taylor’s many inventions, Honeywell was able to grow and expand to a point where today it is recognized as one of the world’s leaders in automatic instrumentation, controls, and data processing.

For his work in the aeronautical instrumentation field, Taylor was given the prestigious H.W. Sweat Award, a special Honeywell award presented to outstanding scientists and engineers in the company. The invention for which he received this award was a low-cost angular rate measuring device for aircraft auto-pilots which overcame many problems, including non-linearity, drift and spurious output characteristically associated with devices of that time.

After leaving Honeywell, Taylor continued to be active in the engineering consultation field, both abroad and in the continental United States. Representative of his work in this regard is a patent on a dual centrifuge for blood separation which was assigned to the Minneapolis War Memorial Blood Bank.