There is nothing particularly novel in the principles involved in this aerial road, but it is the first of its kind to be built for passenger traffic. Similar less pretentious roads have been in use for freight transportation for several years. But the success of this road means the building of others on inaccessible mountain inclines where the laying of ordinary roadbeds is out of the question, and the operating of cog roads too expensive.
VII
THE GYROCAR
ON the 8th of May, 1907, Mr. Louis Brennan exhibited, at a soirée of the Royal Society in London, a remarkable piece of mechanism, which stirred the imagination of every beholder, and—next morning—as reported by the newspapers, aroused the amazed interest of the world. This invention consists of a car run on a single rail, standing erect like a bicycle when in motion; but, unlike the bicycle, being equally stable when at rest.
It is a car that could cross the gorge of Niagara on a tight-rope, like Blondin himself, but with far greater security; a car that shows many strange properties, seeming to defy not gravitation alone but the simplest laws of motion. For example, if a weight is placed on one edge of the car that side rises higher instead of being lowered.
If you push against the side with your hand, the mysterious creature—you feel that it must be endowed with life—is actually felt to push back as if resenting the affront.
Similarly, if the wind blows against the car, it veers over toward the wind. If the track on which it runs—consisting of an ordinary gas-pipe or of a cable of wire—is curved, even very sharply, the car follows the curve without difficulty, and, in defiance of ordinary laws of motion, actually leans inward as a bicycle rider leans under the same circumstances, instead of being careened outward as one might expect.
A curious mechanism, surely, this new car, with its four wheels set in line, bicycle fashion, running thus steadily. But strangest of all it seemed when it poised and stood perfectly still on its tight-rope, as no Blondin could ever do. As stably poised it stood there as if it had two rails beneath it instead of a single wire; and there was nothing about it to suggest an explanation of the miracle, except that there came from within the car the murmur of whirling wheels.
The mysterious wheels in question would be found, if we could look within the structure of the car, to be two in number, arranged quite close together on each side of the centre of the car. They are two small fly-wheels, in closed cases, revolving in opposite directions, each propelled by an electric motor. These are the wonder-workers. They constitute the two-lobed brain or, if you prefer, the double-chambered heart of the strange organism. All the world has learned to call them gyroscopes. The vehicle that they balance may conveniently be termed a gyrocar—a name that has the sanction of the inventor himself.