Science: Sperry Bright

U. S. engineering, through its major body, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, annually singles out one of its members for highest honors and presents him with a medal established in 1902 in memory of John Fritz, iron and steel pioneer. It has given the Fritz medal to Lord Kelvin (transatlantic cables), George Westinghouse (air brakes), Alexander Graham Bell (telephones). Last week it designated a slender little man from whose brain have sprung electric arc lights, electric carriages, gyroscopes, super-search-lights, compound Diesel engines. It named Elmer Ambrose Sperry and specifically recognized his “development of the gyrocompass and the application of the gyroscope to the stabilization of ships and airplanes.”

It was 30 years ago that Mr. Sperry turned his ubiquitous attention to that toy of mathematicians—;a flywheel with a hoop around it, spinning in a frame on light bearings—of which the internal equilibrium is sufficient to withstand outer forces that seek to upset its balance. In the arc-light field, it is 47 years since he won practical adoption for his first invention; 43 years since he erected a 40,000-candle-power beacon on Lake Michigan. Last week, at the Electrical and Industrial Exposition in Manhattan, Army engineers demonstrated the two-billion-candle-power searchlight he had made them (TIME, March 30, 1925), by which a man 40 miles away can see to read a newspaper. Coincidentally, it was also the 47th anniversary of Thomas Alva Edison’s perfection of a 16-candle-power electric lamp.