Nice Gyro Nitro.
History
The gyroscope is a popular children's toy, so it is no surprise that its ancestor is the spinning top, one of the world's oldest toys. A single-frame gyroscope is sometimes called a gyrotop; conversely, a top is a frameless gyroscope. In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, scientists including Galileo (1564-1642), Christiaan Huygens (1629-1695), and Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) used toy tops to understand rotation and the laws of physics that explain it. In France during the 1800s, the scientist Jean-Bernard-Léon Foucault (1819-1868) studied experimental physics and proved Earth's rotation and explained its effect on the behavior of objects traveling on Earth's surface. In the 1850s, Foucault studied the motions of a rotor mounted in a gimbal frame and proved that the spinning wheel holds its original position, or orientation, in space despite Earth's rotation. Foucault named the rotor and gimbals the gyroscope from the Greek words
gyros and
skopien meaning "rotation" and "to view."
It was not until the early 1900s that inventors found a use for the gyroscope. Hermann Anschiutz-Kaempfe, a German engineer and inventor, recognized that the stable orientation of the gyroscope could be used in a gyrocompass. He developed the gyrocompass for use in a submersible for undersea exploration where normal navigation and orientation systems are impractical. In 1906, Otto Schlick tested a gyroscope equipped with a rapidly spinning rotor in the German torpedo boat
See-bar. The sea caused the torpedo boat to roll 15° to each side, or 30° total; when his gyroscope was operated at full speed, the boat rolled less than 1° total.
In the United States, Elmer Ambrose Sperry (1860-1930)—an inventor noted for his achievements in developing electrical loco-motives and machinery transmissions—introduced a gyrocompass that was installed on the U.S. battleship
Delaware in 1911. In 1909, he had developed the first automatic pilot, which uses the gyroscope's sense of direction to maintain the course of an airplane. The Anschiütz Company installed the first automatic pilot—based on a three-frame gyroscope—in a Danish passenger ship in 1916. In that year, the artificial horizon for aircraft was designed as well. The artificial horizon tells the pilot how the airplane is rolling (moving side to side) or pitching (moving front to rear) when the visible horizon vanishes in the clouds or other conditions.
Roll-reduction was needed for ships, too. The Sperry Company had introduced a gyrostabilizer that used a two-frame gyroscope in 1915. The roll of a ship on the ocean makes passengers seasick, causes cargo to shift and suffer damage, and induces stresses in the ship's hull. Sperry's gyrostabilizer was heavy, expensive, and occupied a lot of space on a ship. It was made obsolete in 1925 when the Japanese devised an underwater fin for stabilizing ships.
During the intense development of missile systems and flying bombs before and during World War II, two-frame gyroscopes were paired with three-frame instruments to correct roll and pitch motions and to provide automatic steering, respectively. The Germans used this combination on the V-1 flying bomb, the V-2 rocket, and a pilotless airplane. The V-2 is considered an early ballistic missile. Orbiting spacecraft use a small, gyroscope-stabilized platform for their navigation systems. This characteristic of gyroscopes to remain stable and define direction to a very high degree of accuracy has been applied to gunsights, bombsights, and the shipboard platforms that support guns and radar. Many of these mechanisms were greatly improved during World War II, and the inertial navigation systems that use gyroscopes for spacecraft were invented and perfected in the 1950s as space exploration became increasingly important.
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