8-6-14: Gyroscope Train

[xoxoxoBruce]

Louis Brennan must of had a one track mind, for he spent years and a fortune developing a single track railroad.

Early in his life, Brennan thought about the ordinary spinning top, and noted that so long as it spins it has the very balancing power that he was seeking. He saw that if you kept a top spinning indefinitely (say by electricity) it would balance itself indefinitely on a point, and that this would be true even if you made the top large and heavy. Brennan bought various kinds of tops, and made new kinds, and experimented with them and puzzled over them for hours and weeks and years. One result of his puzzling was the steerable torpedo, the invention of which he sold some years ago to the British government for $550,000—the largest sum of money ever paid by a government for any invention; for the steering-gear of this is based upon the principle of the revolving wheel.

Brennan's vision was a train of several cars, each weighing 100 tons empty, traveling at 200 miles per hour, from NYC to San Francisco in a day. His working models were impressive.

The impression made by these demonstrations on the scientific and mechanical world has been marked. The foremost engineering authorities of England—such men as Sir John Wolfe Wolfe-Barry, builder of the famous Tower Bridge, and Professor John Perry of the Royal College of Science, South Kensington—have made a careful study of this invention and have reported favorably on it; the British War Office—a cold-blooded body not at all inclined to give up money easily—has recently, on the, advice of its experts, appropriated for Mr. Brennan the sum of six thousand pounds to enable him to build a large mono-rail car on the plan of his present small model, and has offered him the use of the government torpedo factory at Chatham for the pursuit of his mono-rail experiments, in which he will have imported military assistance.

Another proposal came from South Africa.

I suggested an overland (mono-rail) route from the Rand, starting from Johannesburg and running in a northwest direction to Victoria Falls through the Kongo Free State, skirting Lake Chad, then traversing Morocco to Tangiers. The journey from the Rand to London could thus be easily made in six days instead of twenty-one, as now in force."

Ah, the good old days, when science and the power of Old Blighty could do anything imagined.

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