VV(11): Gyrocompass

[Dave Monroe]

"For some reason the children of America conceived around this time a 
simultaneous and psychopathic craving for simple gyroscopes, the kind which 
are set in motion by a string wound around a rotating shaft, something like 
a top.  Chiclitz, recognizing a market potential there, decided to expand.  
He was well on the way to cornering the toy gyroscope market when along came 
a group of school kids on a tour to point out that these toys worked on the 
same principle as a gyrocompass.  'As wha,' said Chiclitz.  They explained 
gyrocompasses to him, also rate and free gyros." (V., Ch. 8, Sec. iv, p. 
227)

"a simultaneous and psychopathic craving"--er, a fad? cf. the hula hoop, 
"you know, for kids" ...

"something like a top"--or a yo-yo ...

"when along came a group of school kids"--vs. "'As wha'" ...

"rate and free gyros"--"Rate gyroscopes are used for such purposes as 
measuring rate of turn in aircraft or roll rate in ships.  Free gyroscopes, 
like 'sovereign yo-yos' [p. 217], must come under a degree of control before 
they can be used for practical purposes."  J. Kerry Grant, A Companion to 
V., p. 114 ...

Helpful hyperlinks ...

http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/5/0,5716,39455+1,00.html

http://www.accs.net/users/cefpearson/gyro.htm

http://www.howstuffworks.com/gyroscope.htm

... not to mention some history.  From Donald MacKenzie, Inventing Accuracy: 
A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance (Cambridge, MA: MIT 
Press, 1990), Chapter 2, "Inventing a Black Box," pp. 27-94, on "Gyro 
Culture." We enter mid-paragraph ...

It was only in the twentieth century that the idea of navigation by the 
double integration of acceleration took on potential technological
significance.

"Gyro Culture"

    What gave it that significance was the development at the end of the 
nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century of a whole set of 
knowledge, skills, ideas and devices based around the gyroscope; what I 
refer to below as "gyro culture."
    Although the device predated him--indeed it can be seen as a
derivative of the age-old spinning top--the person who christened it in the 
1850s was the French physicist Leon Foucault.  He conducted a series of 
experiments to demonstrate the rotation of the earth, the most famous of 
which employed a large swinging pendulum.  As it swung, the plane of its 
swing gradually rotated ....  Foucault argued that the plane of the 
pendulum's swing remained in the same orientation in "inertial  space" (that 
is, with respect to the fixed stars) while the earth rotated.  The 
consequent apparent movement allowed the earth's rotation to be "seem."
    Foucault hoped that the "gyroscope" too would allow it to be seen:
hence his name for the device, from the Greek gyros (a circle or rotation) 
and skopeein (to see).... (31-2)

    In the 1860s, however, the gyroscope was brought together with the
emerging technology of electric motors, and this piece of not altogether 
successful science slowly became successful technology.  With energy 
supplied electrically, a gyro could spin more or less indefinitely.  This 
made conceivable the use of a different effect described by Foucault.  When 
he constrained the axis of rotation of his gyroscope to remain in the 
horizontal plane, he found, he said, that instead of remaining in its 
original orientation the axis "directed itself towards the north," just like 
a magnetic compass.  Making use of electric motors, a succession of 
prototype gyrocompasses was built from the 1860s onward.  (33)

    In practice, these devices were not rivals of the magnetic compass.  The 
person who finally developed a practical gyrocompass was a man who seemed 
very unlikely to succeed in such a task.  Dr. Hermann Franz Joseph Hubertus 
Maria Anschutz-Kaempfe (1872-1931) had a breadth of interests that would 
lead one to suspect him of being a dilettante: he first studied medicine and 
then art history, and became a polar
explorer.
    But Anschutz-Kaempfe also had an obsession--a submarine voyage to
the North Pole.... (33)

... visions of polar exploration faded as he began the process of tying his 
technology to powerful interests.  (34)

    The German navy was finally persuaded to try the Anschutz-Kaempfe
gyrocompass--indeed to try it on the most prestigious platform possible, the 
flagship Deutschland....  A new technology of power was in the making.  (35)

    The trials on the Deutschland were no secret; they attracted wide 
interest, most consequentially that of the American inventor, Elmer Sperry.  
Despite the naval rivalry, Anschutz and Company was not prevented from 
selling abroad .... Sperry threw his efforts into designing his own 
gyrocompass and by the autumn of 1910 had done so.  In April of that year he 
established the Sperry Gyroscope Company.  The Anschutz and Sperry companies 
fought hard in the years 1910-1914 to dominate the world market for the new 
device.   Anschutz and Company raised a breach-of-patent action against 
Sperry ....  The court called as a witness a physicist who had become one of 
the leading technical experts in the Swiss patent office, Albert Einstein.   
   Einstein's testimony may have helped Anschutz win their case; he even 
suggested at least one improvement ... (35-6)

[n.b.--Happy Birthday, Albert Einstein!]

    But neither Einstein nor the law could protect Anschutz's monopoly.  
After August 1914, the geopolitics of war replaced commercial competition 
and legal niceties.  Sperry was left in effective command of the Allied 
market ... (36)

    The gyrocompass was only one element--though perhaps the most central 
one--in a wave of practical applications of gyroscopic techniques.  The 
gyroscope could also be used to stabilize a vehicle ... (36-7)

... the growing importance of aircraft.  (37)

The Sperry Gyroscope Company, in particular, moved quickly and successfully 
into the new field, developing a gyroscopic automatic aircraft stabilizer 
... (37)

    Gyro culture was both international--in that its pioneers in different 
countries were well aware of each other's work--and national--in that it was 
increasingly seen as a "technology of power"
too important to permit dependence on external sources, at least if a
country had pretensions of playing a major world role. (37)

Gyroscopes behave counterintuitively.  (38)

    But there was much more to gyro culture than die Theorie des Kreisels.  
Building working gyroscopic systems required manual skills and "tacit 
knowledge" [Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge] as well as
theoretical understanding.  That practical foundation was to be central to 
the development of inertial navigation.  Equally important, the success of 
gyro culture moved the gyroscope from the status of curiosity to that of a 
highly visible, prestigious technology.... the twentieth-century dreamers of 
black-box navigation without exception incorporated a gyroscope somewhere in 
their dreams.  (40)

... well, except maybe that one "dreamer" of Schwartzgerat navigation,
who pursued a different route, no?  Otherwise, double integration,
gyroscopes, guidance, axis of rotation, polar exploration, the navy
(German or otherwise), Einstein, Sperry (later Sperry Rand), aircraft,
the proverbial black-box.  In the meantime, some further recommended reading 
...

Hughes, Thomas Parke.  Elmer Sperry: Inventor and Engineer.
    Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1971.

Schuler, Max.  "Die geschichtliche Entwicklung des Kreiselkompasses
    in Deutschland."  Zeitschrift des Vereines deutscher Ingenieure,
    Vol. 104 (1962): 469-76, 593-9.

Sorg, H.W.  "From Serson to Draper--Two Centuries of Gyroscopic
    Development."  Navigation, Vol. 23 (1976-77): 313-24.

Gleaned from footnotes in MacKenzie.  I've browsed the Hughes (author as 
well of American Genesis: A Century of Invention and Technological 
Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 and Networks of Power: Electrification in Western 
Society, 1880-1930, q.v.) book, see pp. 273-4, n. 109 on the V-weapons.  
"The gyro control for the V-1 was supplied by the firm of Askania"--cf. the 
"Askania cinetheodolite rigs" @ GR, p. 407.  "The V-2 ... also operated 
under gyro guidance" (Hughes, p. 274).  Here see MacKenzie, pp. 50-60 ...
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