Elmer Ambrose Sperry

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The technical achievements of Elmer A. Sperry (1860-1930) made him one of the most prolific and capable inventors in American history. Like other successful inventors, he knew how to mix finance, engineering, and management to develop unique inventions into commercial products.

Born on October 12, 1860, Elmer Sperry grew up near the small town of Cortland, New York. His mother died a few hours after his birth, and he was raised in a devout Baptist home by an aunt and his grandparents. Sperry showed a natural aptitude and interest in mechanical things during his youth.

While in high school Sperry did well in science and drawing. The drawing skills would prove important in his later years as he visualized and communicated to others his many inventions. Sperry constantly read in the technical library of the local Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA), and during a YMCA-sponsored trip to the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia he was exposed to the inventions and technical achievements of booming America.

Arc Light System

At the age of 19 Sperry invented an electrical regulator, part of an electric light circuit. Helped by the Cortland Wagon Company, which had a strong engineering department, Sperry acquired the tools, supplies, assistants, legal assistance, and other institutional support he needed to develop his invention into a complete arc light system. He moved to Chicago and, backed by money from hometown Cortland and from investors in Chicago whom he met through the Baptist community, he started selling his system there.

Although Sperry's system was technically capable, it could not compete with its better-financed and better-run competitors. His company failed after about five years. But the particular needs of arc light systems had forced him to learn about automatic controls and feedback systems, on which he spent much of his future career.

Commitment to Research and Development

Through his wife, the former Zula Goodman of Chicago, Sperry had access to many people with money to invest and positions of power and influence. A good speaker, a charming person, and an enthusiastic booster of his projects - in addition to being technically gifted - Sperry had acquired the skills he needed for a consistently successful career.

To avoid the routine, day-to-day engineering required by his first company, Sperry created a new company devoted to research and development. The new company let Sperry do what he did best: finding new ideas, directing the building of working models, and looking for problems that his inventions could solve. Sperry deliberately avoided manufacturing, selling to other companies the production rights to his inventions.

For the next 20 years, Sperry entered a series of new fields just as they began rapid development. He chose fields that were attracting lots of financial investors, which provided the money needed for his inventive activity. He worked in the fields of electric light and power, mining machinery, electric traction (streetcars), automobiles, batteries, and industrial chemistry.

Before inventing, Sperry always carefully analyzed earlier work to identify critical problems and to find existing inventions to which he could add his own expertise. Sperry concentrated on electrically-based inventions, such as electrical machinery and electrochemistry. In each field, he tried to solve critical problems that were holding it back.

The Gyro

In 1907 Sperry became interested in using gyroscopes to provide stability to moving vehicles. Other inventors had designed "gyrostabilizers" that could help ships avoid the rolling caused by waves and wind. If you try to tip a spinning gyroscope, it will turn to one side in a predictable way - called "precession." In the same way, the force of a spinning gyrostabilizer pushed a rolling ship in the opposite direction from the push of the waves. Sperry invented a motion sensor, a motor to amplify the effect of the sensor on the gyroscope, and an automatic feedback and control system. All worked together to make a much more effective gyrostabilizer.

Because he had analyzed the market for gyrostabilizers, Sperry was able to put himself in the right place at the right time. The U.S. Navy was building new, mammoth battleships that would be unusable without some form of sophisticated stabilizer. The Navy provided critical development support for Sperry, including the men, materials, and money needed to build models and experiment with ever-larger gyros. Navy support replaced the private financial investment on which Sperry had relied in the past.

In 1910 Sperry created a company to specialize in gyroscopes. Over the next 20 years Sperry and his company invented, among other things, a gyrocompass, a stabilizer for airplanes, gunfire control systems, and an automatic pilot for planes. Like so many of his earlier inventions, these often relied on automatic control and feedback systems.

Although Sperry had become well-known in technical circles, World War I placed him high in the public's awareness and provided him with much material success. His inventions were used heavily by the British, Russian, German, and American navies. As the second most famous inventor in America (after Thomas Edison), he served on the Naval Consulting Board and directed some of its major projects. He won many international awards, helped create the American Institute of Electrical Engineers and the American Electro-Chemical Society, and was a leading member of many other professional organizations.

During the final decade of Sperry's life he further developed many of the systems he had started during the World War I years, adapting them to peacetime uses (such as taking a searchlight invented for antiaircraft warfare and using it as a beacon for the new airmail service). Sperry did not invent in isolation, but tried to take existing devices and methods and apply them to new areas. This was one of the critical elements of his style as an inventor and researcher.

By the time of his death in 1930, Sperry met regularly with Rockefellers, presidents, ambassadors, and others. His biographer has called him "the father of automatic feedback and control systems."

Further Reading

The most complete treatment of Sperry - including many technical details about his work - is in Thomas Parke Hughes, Elmer Sperry: Inventor and Engineer (1971). For a more contemporary perspective, see the obituary which appeared in J. C. Hunsaker, "Biographical Memoir of Elmer Ambrose Sperry, 1860-1930," Biographical Memoirs, National Academy of Sciences 28 (1954).

Additional Sources

Hughes, Thomas Parke, Science and the instrument-maker: Michelson, Sperry, and the speed of light, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press: for sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. Govt. Print. Off., 1976.

Elmer Ambrose Sperry
Personal information
Nationality	United States
Birth date	October 12, 1860(1860-10-12)
Birth place	Cortland, New York
Date of death	June 16, 1930 (aged 69)
Place of death	Brooklyn, New York
Education	Cornell University
Work
Significant projects	gyroscopic compasses

Elmer Ambrose Sperry (October 12, 1860 – June 16, 1930) was a prolific inventor and entrepreneur, most famous as co-inventor, with Herman Anschütz-Kaempfe of the gyrocompass.

Sperry was born at Cortland, New York, United States of America. He spent three years at the state normal school there, then a year at Cornell University in 1878 and 1879, where he became interested in dynamo electricity. He moved to Chicago, Illinois, early in 1880 and, soon after founded the Sperry Electric Company. 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 from salt and discovered a process for recovering tin from scrap metal. Sperry experimented with diesel engines and gyroscopic compasses and stabilizers for ships and aircraft. In 1910 he started the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Brooklyn, New York; his first compass was tested that same year in USS Delaware (BB-28). His compasses and stabilizers were adopted by the United States Navy and used in both world wars. 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 and taking out over 400 patents, Sperry died in Brooklyn on 12 June 1930.

His companies included:

• Sperry Electric Mining Machine Company, (1888);
• Sperry Electric Railway Company, (1894);
• Chicago Fuse Wire Company, (1900); and
• Sperry Rail Service (1911)a railroad defect detection company.
• Sperry Gyroscope Company (1910), founded to manufacture Sperry's development of the gyrocompass, originally invented by Herman Anschütz-Kaempfe in 1908. Sperry's first model was installed on the battleship USS Delaware in 1911.

The companies eventually evolved into the Sperry Corporation.

Sperry was also a founding member of the US Naval Consulting Board, 1915.

In 1916, Sperry joined Peter Hewitt to develop the Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane, one of the first successful precursors of the UAV.

USS Sperry (AS-12) was named for him, as was the annual Elmer A. Sperry Award for Advancing the Art of Transportation.

References

• Thomas P. Hughes, Elmer Sperry: Inventor and Engineer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971).
• Fahrney, Delmer S. (RAdm ret): History of Radio-Controlled Aircraft and Guided Missiles
• This article includes text from the public domain Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.

External links

• Obituary, New York Times, Elmer Sperry Dies; Famous Inventor, June 17, 1930
• Elmer A. Sperry case file at the Franklin Institute contains records concerning his 1914 Franklin Award for the gyroscopic compass
• U.S. Patent 1,279,471 for the gyroscopic compass, filed June, 1911; issued September, 1918
• US Patent search page, search for Elmer and Sperry in Inventor name, 1790-present, yields about 160 results--some recent ones are by EA Sperry Jr, ealiest ones not found
• Elmer Ambrose Sperry at Find a Grave

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