Sperry Bright

Nero himself, given to lighting displays, would have envied the white-haired, alert inventor, with snapping eyes and snapping speech, who could burn, for an evening's divertisement a billion and 200 million candles. Surely an Emperor's diversion!

Yet the inventor with no imperial regalia sent aloft into the night sky a great kite, turned a switch and the great beam of his 1,200,000,000 candle light, pricking the darkness upward 30,000 feet, circled and swung and caught within its unblinking gaze the kite, too high for the ordinary eye to see. Was there then wassail and revelry in celebration?

Far otherwise. Elmer A. Sperry merely announced that lie was now prepared to produce a 1,200,000,000 candlepower light, capable of penetrating 30,000 feet of darkness, weighing only 1,500 pounds, so built that it can be surrounded with sand bags and made immune to all airplane bombing except a direct hit and electrically controlled so that it may be operated from a distance, where the operator's eyes are not blinded by its glare.

But the chances are that the name of Sperry will not be remembered for this feat. It will be remembered for other and greater achievements which Elmer A. Sperry, now a man of 64, and his almost equally brilliant son who died two years and more ago accomplished.

Elmer, the father, got his technical training at Cornell. When he was 19, he produced an arc lamp and soon after secured patents on motors, generators and their regulators. At 20, he established the Sperry Light Co. in Chicago to produce apparatus of his invention. At 23, he built for the Chicago Board of Trade the first high-powered electric beacon, consisting of 20 arc lamps of 40,000 candlepower on a steel tower 303 feet high.

He turned his genius to the application of electricify to mining machinery, improved storage batteries, electrical automobiles. At 30 he began the work which brought him fame, the production of a commercial gyroscope. First, he developed the gyroscopic compass. It was a difficult task that for a long time took his whole attention. He developed a small revolving wheel that would take the place of the magnetic needle in a ship's compass until we now have an instrument that automatically corrects for a ship its speed and direction and, unaffected by the rolling of the vessel, unaltered by heavy gunfire, by differences in the magnetism of the ship, by the proximity of iron, points always to the true north and guides from 1 to 35 other compasses scattered through the vessel from its master mechanism. Delicate, complicated, expensive--but reliable--it has supplanted the magnetic compass on all warships and on many a merchant vessel. Having succeeded with this marvelous bit of mechanism, Mr. Sperry turned his attention to the development of the gyroscope on a larger scale--to have a revolving wheel which, instead of keeping a needle pointing in one direction by its centrifugal force, would keep a whole ship steady amid the pounding of waves. The gyroscopic stabilizer has proved successful, not only with ships, but also with airplanes. For these achievements, he has received many medals, honors, prizes, including the first prize of 50,000 francs in the aerial security contest at Bezons, France, in 1914.

His son, Lawrence B. Sperry, at 17, built and operated an airplane. In 1914, he demonstrated his father's stabilizer at Bezons, having a mechanic walk out on the wing while he left the machine entirely under its own control, then an unheard-of feat. The tiny plane Messenger, which he built and used for commuting between his home and the Sperry Gyroscope factory on Long Island, was used in the Army during the War. He himself served as a Lieutenant. He was the. first to loop the loop in a hydroplane, the first to land in city streets, the first to experiment in night flying, the first to make contact with another plane in air, a pioneer in parachute development. In 1922, be landed "on the steps of the National Capitol" with a baby plane of 20-foot wingspread, and weighing only 500 Ibs.

In 1923, he went to England with a baby plane and used it electioneering for the Liberal Party. In mid-December, having business in France, he started to fly across the Channel. Something went amiss in the air and he turned back, but soon turned around and headed to sea once more. His plane was seen to crumple and fall (TIME, Dec. 24, 1923). The machine minus the engine was recovered, and, later, young Sperry's body.

The Sperry name does not need one billion, 200 million candles to illuminate it.