The first question that the average man asks when he sees a gyroscope is:
“Well, this thing may be all right when it is in motion, but how the deuce is it going to support itself when it is standing still?”
But it does support itself. The gyroscope wheels continue to revolve at something close to 8,000 revolutions a minute, and they hold the car, so that the fluctuation in the weight it carries, due to loading or unloading, does not affect it, even in slight degree. The average man remains unconvinced.
“Suppose the electric power that spins the gyroscope goes back on you?” he demands. The inventor tells him that that is easy enough. The gyroscope, revolving in a vacuum, will keep on turning at sufficient speed to balance the car for nearly an hour. Long before that the side-stays, that make the car a three-pronged structure while out of service, can be dropped.
When To-morrow finally comes and the gyroscope car is in its own, provision will be made on all through mono-rail routes against just such an emergency. At various points sidings will be constructed with low walls, just high enough to receive the cars when their gyroscope equilibrium ceases. These will be just as much a part of the equipment of the mono-rail trunk line as wharves are a part of steamship service. It will be a part that will receive less and less attention as folk begin to realize how little dependent the gyroscope car is upon the old laws of gravity.
“We will have billiard cars in our fastest trains,” says Brennan. “A man will be able to play that delicate game on a railroad train all the way from New York to San Francisco, if he chooses.”
Contemplate that, you railroaders and travelled folk of to-day. Those cars will make the cars of to-day seem like pygmies. Each will be 200 feet in length and 30 feet in width. No wonder that people can talk of billiard tables. A train of six of these cars will be longer than the longest of our transcontinental expresses of to-day. They will be fastened together with vestibule connections, and the forward end of the first car will have a sharp beak. The blunt front of an ordinary train begins to be a speed obstacle at more than 50 miles an hour.
Speed? Do you think that 50 miles an hour is speed? Our locomotives do far better than that every day in the United States. A train on a standard railroad and hauled by steam as a motive power has gone faster than the rate of 135 miles an hour. With the mono-rail and the gyroscope, with the countless mountain brooks and rivers harnessed and grinding out electricity, the inventors say calmly that they will begin at 200 miles an hour.
Do you realize what 200 miles an hour means? It means that your grandson or your grandson’s son can leave New York in the morning, do half a dozen errands in Cincinnati, and be back in his home in West Four Hundred and Thirty-eighth Street in time for a late supper. It means that he can lunch in Chicago, span half a dozen mighty States, threading the mountains, through the towns and over the cities, skimming the broad expanses of fat farms, and dine in New York the same night. It means that he can go from one ocean across the continent to the other in twenty-four hours.
But To-morrow is not yet here. Yesterday was just here. In Yesterday men were boasting of their ability to go from New York to Philadelphia by coach in two nights and two days and were asking: