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MST Library

This is an interesting source, Adam. It's Transactions of the New York Electrical Society. Page 81 (page 148 of the ebook) is an article about the airplane stabilizer. The ebook page VIII shows him as one of the vice presidents and chair of the reception committee for 1912-1913.

https://play.google.com/books/reader?id=JIgmAQAAMAAJ&hl=en&pg=GBS.PP8

Elmer Ambrose Sperry

CHANGED

Elmer Ambrose Sperry, Sr. (October 12, 1860 – June 16, 1930) was an American inventor and entrepreneur, most famous as co-inventor, with Herman Anschütz-Kaempfe of the gyrocompass and as founder of the Sperry Gyroscope Company. His compasses and stabilizers were adopted by the United States Navy and used in both world wars.

Biography

Early Life

Sperry was born at Cincinnatus, New York on October 12, 1860 to Stephen Decatur Sperry and Mary Burst. He was of English ancestry. His family had been in what is now the Northeastern United States since the 1600s, and his earliest American ancestor was an English colonist named Richard Sperry. His mother died the next day, from complications from his birth.

He spent three years at the State Normal School in Cortland, New York, then a year at Cornell University in 1878 and 1879, where he became interested in dynamos . He moved to Chicago, Illinois, early in 1880 and soon after founded the Sperry Electric Company. He married Zula Augusta Goodman (1860-1929) in Chicago, Illinois on June 28, 1887.

In 1887, Sperry created a system to bring electricity into coal mines, heating the copper wires to prevent corrosion. This system allowed him to bring self-designed mining equipment deep below the surface to greatly increase the production of coal, and in 1888 the Sperry Electric Machinery Mining Company was founded.

In 1890, Sperry formed the Sperry Electric Railway Company. Here he used ideas from his electric trains sold by his mining company to create electric trolleys in large, hilly cities in Ohio and Pennsylvania. While working with this company, Sperry designed an electric automobile, which lead to Sperry patenting ideas that would be later used in the development of portable lead acid batteries. In 1894, General Electric bought the railway company and its associated patents.

In 1900 Sperry established an electrochemical laboratory at Washington, D.C., where he and his associate, Clifton P. Townshend, developed a process for making pure caustic soda and discovered a process for recovering tin from scrap metal.

Work With Gyroscopes

After experiencing seasickness on a Atlantic voyage in 1898, Sperry started to work on incorporating a large gyroscope into a ship to lessen the effect of waves on the ship. His gyroscope stabilized ship differed from others at the time by having a sensor built in to the system to detect the first signs of a wave that the system would have to work to mitigate. And in 1911, Sperry worked with the US Navy to incorporate his gyroscopic stabilizer which greatly reduced major roll of the ship. While effective, Sperry's gyrostablizer proved to never hit a mass market because of its expense, both in installation and in maintenance cost.

Sperry found another use for his gyroscopes in 1908. Magnetic compasses on steel battleships at the time had issues with maintaining magnetic north with the variations of the magnetic field they experienced. Working with Hannibal C. Ford, Sperry began work on a gyro compass to replace the magnetic compass. In 1910 he founded the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Brooklyn, New York on the basis of this innovation. His first navigational gyroscope was tested in 1911 on the USS Delaware (BB-28). After successful tests, Sperry's gyro compass was soon being installed on American, British, French, Italian, and Russian naval crafts. During World War I, the importance of the gyro compass increased as the compass was adapted to control the steering of a ship to automatically hold a steady line.

During both world wars, Sperry's company profited from military demand for gyroscopes.

Aircraft Improvements

In 1913, working with his son Lawrence Burst Sperry, Sperry created a gyro that could control the elevators and ailerons of an aircraft through a series of servos. With this system implemented in an aircraft, the Sperry successfully implemented his gyrostablizer technology formerly thought to be only applicable to large ships, because of their high weight, into aircraft. In June 1914, they won the Aero Club of France's competition to build a safer aircraft, demonstrating the stabilizer with his son doing a "no-hands" flight past the judges. He also was awarded a Franklin Institute Medal in the same year. This gyrostabilization system, while never implemented on a massive scale, laid the foundation for his son's autopilot system.

In 1917, Sperry solved an issue regarding magnetic compasses indicating the opposite position when an aircraft is turning, inventing the Gyro Turn Indicator. This turn indicator was later modified into what is known now as the Turn and Slip Indicator. With a Directional Gyro and Gyro Horizon added later to form a collection of flight instruments, Sperry created a core of flight instruments that became standard equipment on all aircraft.

During World War I Elmer worked to create a "flying bomb", and on March 6,1918 he guided an aerial torpedo over half a mile using radio control. His technology was used in torpedoes, ships, airplanes, and spacecraft. Sperry moved into related devices such as bombsights, fire control, radar, and automated take off and landing.

Naval Turret Improvements

Working with the US Navy, Sperry developed a system to control the entire battery of a battleship from a interior room of the ship. This control system used his gyroscopic equipment to correct the individual gun's position based on changes in course of the ship, allowing the entire battery to be controlled to focus one point. This control system was installed on all battleships of the United States Navy during World War I. Starting in 1914, Sperry began working with the US Navy to develop higher power lighting for use with naval turrets. Out of this partnership, Sperry and his team at the time created a new kind of arc lamp that heated a gas to incandescence, creating a source of light five times brighter than other continuous light sources of the time. In 1918 he produced a high-intensity arc lamp which was used as a searchlight by both the Army and Navy after setting up eight companies.

Late Life and Death

In 1923, his son, Lawrence Burst Sperry, died in the English Channel in the crash of an airplane of his own design. In January 1929, Sperry sold his Sperry Gyroscope Company to North American Aviation. The following year his wife died on March 31, in Havana, Cuba.

He died at St. John Hospital in Brooklyn, New York on June 16, 1930 from complications following the removal of gallstones six weeks earlier. He was 69 years old.

Memberships

He was a member of the following groups:

• Founder and charter member of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers
• Founder and charter member of the American Electro-Chemical Society
• American Association for the Advancement of Science
• American Physical Society
• American Society of Mechanical Engineers
• Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers
• New York Electrical Society
• American Petroleum Institute
• Edison Pioneers

  

  Elmer Ambrose Sperry demonstrating the operation of a searchlight

• National Aeronautical Association
• Aero Club of America
• Engineers' Club
• National Electric Light Association
• Franklin Institute
• Japan Society
• National Academy of Sciences
• Director of the Museum of the Peaceful Arts

Awards

• Aero Club of France (1914) for his airplane stabilizer
• Franklin Institute Medal (1914, specific award unknown) for his gyroscopic compass
• Collier Trophy (1914) for gyroscopic control
• Collier Trophy (1916) for his drift indicator
• Holley Medal (1928)
• John Fritz Medal (1927)
• Albert Gary Medal (1927)
• Elliott Cresson Medal (1929) for gyroscopic navigational and recording instruments
• Two decorations from the last Czar of Russia; two decorations from the Emperor of Japan, the Order of the Rising Sun and the Order of the Sacred Treasure; and the grand prize of the Panama Exposition.

Legacy

• USS Sperry (AS-12), a submarine tender, was named for him
• The Sperry Center at SUNY Cortland in Cortland, NY is named for him
• The Elmer A. Sperry Award, which encourages progress in transportation-related engineering, is named for him
• Sperry was also a founding member of the US Naval Consulting Board, 1915.

Peer Review by Cffc77 (talk) 16:50, 22 March 2019 (UTC)

The draft does a really good job at keeping the page looking professional. They kept the overall structure intact while either deleting or inserting their own parts. I would suggest splitting the biography into multiple sections of his life, like “Early Life,” “Starting Sperry Electric Railway Company,” etc. It would really help organize the biography and help viewers find specific information sooner. The most important thing you could improve on this article is go into more detail about the companies Elmer was involved with/started. On the original article, half of the companies don’t have links and no explanation. I would suggest either finding a link, if it exists on Wikipedia, or add in the details of the companies. The one way this can be applicable to my article is that it might be a good idea if my group adds a section about the legacy of the BSA. That way if viewers ask themselves, “Why is this important?” they could see their accomplishments and what impact they have had. Cffc77 (talk) 16:50, 22 March 2019 (UTC)