Consider for a final moment, in passing, the mono-rail, the gyroscope. If you are a practical railroader you may laugh and say: “A toy.” Perhaps it is a toy to-day. But just remember history and you will recall that the toy of to-day becomes the tool of to-morrow, and then give the mono-rail a moment of sober thought. Less than 2,000 feet of this construction formed a most interesting exhibit at the Jamestown Exposition of 1907. A railroad man who rode on that experimental track said:
“If you had built more than 300 feet of track you could have given a better demonstration of your system.” To this the inventor smilingly replied:
“You have gone over 1,800 feet.”
The investigator had ridden faster than 45 miles an hour and had not realized the speed. You never do in the mono-rail car. It rides more gently over the roughest bit of track than the finest Limited moves over heavy rail and stone ballast, the best track that men can maintain.
An actual railroad of the mono-rail type has been built and is being developed in the suburbs of New York City. It supersedes a railroad of the oldest type—horse-cars—from Bartow to City Island, in the Bronx. Balance is kept for its cars by means of a light overhead metal construction, hardly more conspicuous than that of the overhead trolley-work used in city streets. This overhead work, like the trolley-wire, supplies electric power to the cars; only in emergencies will it come into play to hold the one-legged car erect. On this stretch of line speed and balance tests will be made when passenger traffic is at low-tide. Upon the result of these tests will be drawn the construction plans for a four-track rapid transit railroad from New York to Newark, ten miles. This last plan has already been financed by New York men who have made transportation their chief problem for many years. It may be developed upon the rails of a double-track railroad, more than doubling its capacity, without increasing the width of the right-of-way.
All of these mono-rail roads will become applicable to the gyroscope when that wondrous man-toy becomes a man-tool. And the gyroscope demands no overhead construction of any sort. It simply asks a single rail upon which to find a path and offers no objections either to the steepest of grades or to the sharpest of curves. The first model of gyroscope car showed its ability to navigate easily the full length of a piece of crooked gas-pipe, laid in rough semblance of a track.
For there is a gyroscope car already—in fact, several of them. On May 8, 1907, Louis Brennan, a brilliant Irish inventor, living in England, exhibited the first model of the gyroscope car, and the news was flashed in detail all the way around the world. The little car he then showed was enough to interest the keenest of scientists. It traversed every sort of mono-rail track that could be devised, at varying rates of speed, it stood still at the inventor’s command and retained its balance perfectly. When a man’s hand was pushed against it as if to throw the car off its seemingly slight balance, it pushed back, stanchly held that balance, and Brennan laughingly said that there was something that compared with the velocity of the wind. When he spoiled the even trim of his ship (it did look like a boat as it sped around the lawn upon its narrow, guiding thread) and placed the weights upon one side of the car, that side rose up to receive them. The car still held its balance perfectly, and Brennan said that his act represented forty or fifty persons moving suddenly across a full-sized passenger coach. Finally, he placed his little daughter in the car and sent it out over a deep gully where a single stout steel cable served as a suspension bridge. The inventor’s assistant swung that bridge like a hammock but the car laughed at the old-fashioned domineering laws of gravity, and the little girl waved her hand at her daddy.
Well might she wave her hand at him. His achievement was a real triumph. From a top revolving in a frame at any angle he had evolved the gyroscope car, the one thing required for the successful development of the mono-rail. From that car he has been steadily developing better ones. On the tenth of November, 1909, he built a full-sized car upon which twenty men and boys rode in glee. On that self-same day, by strange coincidence, a German inventor, August Scherl, exhibited in a large hall in Dresden, a mono-rail car, held at perfect equilibrium by a gyroscope which he had quietly built and perfected. The car was 18 feet long and 4 feet wide, and mounted on two trucks. The net weight was 2½ tons, while the gyroscope itself, turning in a vacuum at the fearful rate of 8,000 revolutions a minute, weighed but 5½ per cent of the total weight of the car. It carried eight persons, and when first shown in Berlin it caused a tremendous sensation, 60,000 persons witnessing the trial during a period of five days. Even royalty took its turn at riding in the novel conveyance.