Show H THE POSSIBILITIES J OF THE GYROSCOPE On the of last Louis Brennan surprised the public and confuted the expert by exhibiting a car 40 feet 10 feet wide and 13 feet weighing 22 mounted on a single running freely around curves of all carrying forty passengers with safety as complete and vibration far less than the ordinary passenger The public was practically ignorant of the gyroscope until Brennan focused the attention of the world upon it by his startling monorail Yet for over half a century the gyroscopic principle has been put to many important scientific and practical Now that men have succeeded in a new field has been opened for its The greatest drawback to the present use of the aeroplane is its lack of Already men are at work endeavoring to solve this problem by the aid of the That old and universal the contained the germ of these many These are all based upon the peculiar gyroscopic principle that once a top or wheel is set spinning in a certain plane it will hold to that plane with a pertinacity that disregards those laws of gravity which rule every object and individual on If the axis of the whirling top or flywheel is set pointing toward a certain it will continue to point toward that star even while the earth turns around beneath In this was one of the graphic experiments which over half a century ago the great French physicist Foucault used to prove the rotation of the It was in these experiments that the toy was raised to the dignity of a scientific Even long before the gyroscopic principle has been put to practical Perhaps the best known of these is the rifling in gun The spiral grooves running through the inner barrel give the projectile a rotary motion or spin in its flight through the which in creases the as the scientist puts the becomes gyroscope tending J preserve unchanged the direction of its axis of In a few years after FoJ cault's Smyth used the gyroscopic ciple in a device which was tended to secure a steady for an astronomical telescope But first practical usi of the gyroscope itself was mad by L. Obry of of the Austrian He a steering gear for torpedoes in which the gyroscope was utilized to control the rudder of the torpedo and maintain the lat ter on a predetermined By its use a torpedo can be set to run accurately up to Obry's invention is still in and retains its place as one of great inventions in the art of In Otto his or device to the rolling of This dew had been suggested by curious phenomena which the inventor had observed in wheel steamers and which he con-eluded were due to the action of the revolving paddle Experiment made with small models were sur yet j hesitated to test his de vice on a ship until theoretically demonstrated thai an effective need not M of impractical His was' installed on the formerly a torpedo boat in H German The length of boat's water line was 63 The diameter of the was its weight its revolutions per ute To give the an eff tive test the See-Bar proceeded to sea and steamed slowly troa to the This a weather roll of 15 degrees a lee roll of 25 pretty violent Then j hand brake of the cast The and jj case began to swing md the rolling of the vessel was at once The waves appeared to pass under the gently lifting and lowering it without even throwing much spray on the although nautical experts had predicted that the boat would ship heavy seas under the influence of the After personal this received a strong indorsement from no less an authority than Sir William H. former chief constructor of the rn a paper read before the Institution of Naval he stated his belief that the gyroscope would be particularly yachts and on passenger steamers employed in the coasting Because of the great size of modern ocean steamers and their consequent the he for such an apparatus were not so although the steadying apparatus might be introduced to good even Sir William said that there were numerous possible applications for the device on dwelling particularly upon the advantages of securing a steady gun And it was for use at though doubtless outside the scope of Sir William's e that the gyroscopic principle i had its next This the very ingenious use of it in what is known as the Anschutz gyroscope for the purpose of replacing or supplementing the ship Its inventor was a H. Anschutz Broadly in this device the magnetic needle of the compass is replaced by a However much or little the ship turns the persists in maintaining the plane of the axis in which it has been set and by an indicator affixed to the spindle of the it thus points out in degrees on the binnacle the variations in the course of the Exhaustive tests were made by the German navy with the warship which was fitted with this The tests were sufficient to completely disqualify i the magnetic When the trials were the gyroscope as it may be was found to be in as good order as it was in the An interesting speculation is raised as to how the gyroscope principle might be applied to steering airships in a the ordinary compass being untrustworthy in aeroplanes or airships because their engines are worked on the magneto-ignition which deflects the needle With the gyroscope perfected as a compass it could be set spinning in the proper plane and the airship by maintaining the indicated direction could make a straight course for its or ascend from its base in the thickest of Then in came the surprising demonstration of Brennan's The evolution of this invention was the result of some thirty years of continued The model railway and its equipment had been completed for more than two Publicity of the invention had been delayed in deference to the request of the British and Indian both of which had financed the experiments to a certain The car exhibited was a model of one-eighth actual The body of the car was about six feet long and was supported on tiny bicycle trucks at each The wheels were driven by a pair of electric the current being supplied from a storage battery carried by the In an air-tight at the forward end of the were the two gyroscope These wheels' revolved in opposite directions on a horizontal axis at revolutions per The weight of the wheel was only 5 per cent of that of the The members of the Royal Society and its guests were astonished to see this model running along a span of wire balancing itself like a tight-rope When the current was cut off from the gyroscope motors the gyroscope wheels continued to revolve by their own keeping the car upright for several hours before it settled over on the props which were put out at each If the load was shifted to one the car automatically maintained its A boy was given a ride in the and finally a man ventured into the car and rode in perfect safety over the tight-rope An improvised consisting of a length of steel was laid on the ground and twisted about into a most irregular Around this course the little car wended its taking the curves without the slightest One of the experiments at the demonstration which served to show the pertinacity of the gyroscopes in holding to their original set position was that of supporting the car on a tight rope carried by a The frame was first set upright and then swung slowly downward through an arc of ninety or until it lay on its but the instead of being thrown kept its upright position while the rope turned beneath Meanwhile the men engaged in solving the problem of man flight had begun to consider the possibilities of the C. L. Lilienthal in La de l'Air discussed the possibility of utilizing the gyroscope to insure the stability of vessels sailing through the lack of stability constituting the great drawback to the use of the He pointed out the great analogy between the conditions affecting the stability of aeroplanes and the stability of monorail Even before von Lilenthal's Etrich and Weis had patented a similar but had abandoned it during While no experiments were more mature consideration led to the conclusion that a small gyroscope would not be able to govern an aeroplane even by acting upon its upper or balancing and that a heavy gyroscope could not be used because of its weight and the force required to drive it with the necessary and especially because its inertia would interfere with the operations of descending and To overcome these M. Louis of has devised within the year a gyroscopic pendulum of which much is This apparatus only weighs about twenty-eight It has been tested by attaching it to the front of an a transverse bar of wood representing an On being driven through the air at a rapid the assumed by this when the automobile was confirmed 's Practical tests on an aeroplane are contemplated in the near But the gyroscope's most startling history lays within the last five On November Brennan gave the first public demonstration on a full scale of his monorail railway on the War Office grounds near The vehicle runs in a circle an eighth of a mile in circumference at a speed of twenty-five miles an with eighty horse without the slightest tendency to leave the Two gyroscopes weighing three-quarters of a ton each automatically supply perfect The rail closely resembles the ordinary one except that the top is somewhat and the rime of the wheels correspond to this The gyroscope makes revolutions a minute in The motive is entirely self-contained in a petrol engine which is used to drive a The tests already made indicate that the size and weight of the gyroscopes are much greater than is while the stability of the car far exceeds the The vehicle is mounted on four The machinery is contained in a structure in the front portion of the car in order to be easy of but for service it will be located beneath the Great speed is impossible in the present location of the- line on account of the limited length of track When the forty passengers were all crowded upon one side of the car the result was not the depression of that side under the balancing but paradoxically the The more weight was added the higher rose the level of the overloaded as the gyroscopes sought to balance the unequal Town need have no more fears from that is what the storekeeper remarked as he threw the counterfeit twenty-five-cent piece in the which had come back to him several |