page_title: William T. Piper
section_title: Military and aviation career
hierarchical_section_title: William T. Piper / Biography / Military and aviation career
caption_attribution_description: English: iper Cub Góraszka (cropped)
context_page_description: William Thomas Piper Sr. was an American airplane manufacturer, aviation businessman, oil industry businessman, and engineer. He was the founding president of the Piper Aircraft Corporation and led the company from 1929 until his death in 1970. He graduated from Harvard University in 1903 and later became known as "the Henry Ford of aviation".
  Prior to Piper's successful business career he was an officer in the United States Army serving in the Spanish–American War. He was then in the United States Army Corps of Engineers during World War I. In total Piper served 18 years in the Army. When he returned from World War I he was primarily an investor and businessman in the oil industry until 1929 when he became an investor in the Taylor Brothers Aircraft Corporation. He went on to purchase the soon-renamed Taylor Aircraft Corporation and head it until reorganizing the company into Piper Aircraft in 1937, eventually seeing tremendous success and becoming a well-known aviation figure of the 20th century. Piper Aircraft sold over 80,000 units when he oversaw the company, cementing Piper as a global aerospace manufacturing power.
context_section_description: Piper served in the Spanish–American War and World War I, in the latter as a captain in the Corps of Engineers. He made most of his fortune from oil wells. In 1929, he became the original investor in the Taylor Brothers Aircraft Corporation for $400 ($5,647 in 2017 dollars), led then by aircraft designer and aviation entrepreneur Clarence Gilbert Taylor. A year later, during the onset of the Great Depression, the company went bankrupt and Piper bought its assets and reorganized it into the Taylor Aircraft Corporation, keeping Gilbert Taylor on as president. During this period, he sought to manufacture reliable and affordable light aircraft. In 1937, two years after Piper bought out Gilbert Taylor from the company due in part to contentious clashes between the two, he established the Piper Aircraft Corporation and, by 1940, it dominated the light aircraft market. At the time, a Piper Cub and flying lessons cost $1,325 dollars ($19,808 in 2017 dollars). The Piper Cub (which derives from the Taylor Cub) would go on to become the most-produced fabric-covered monoplane in history, with over 20,000 units delivered from 1938–1947. Its simplicity, affordability and popularity often invokes comparisons to the Ford Model T.
caption: Piper J-3 Cub, the company's most influential aircraft
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