The Brennan Mono-Rail Car.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 19, 9 November 1910, Page 42

The Brennan Mono-Rail Car.

By

PERCEVAL GIBBON.

NOTE. —The South Australian Commissioner of Railways has given orders for the construction of a truck to be run on one rail, to experiment tenth the mono-railway. The experiment is to be made with a view to solving the problem of how to get produce to stations in the Pinnaroo district. The commissioner explained that there were four courses open — construction of a broad gauge, narrow gauge feeder lines, the laying down of a mono rail, or the making of roads—and this truck would indicate the value of the mono-rail system. If the experiment was successful the Government intended to build a number of the trucks, and hoped thus to convey produce over the sand hills cheaply.

IT was November 10, 1909 —a day that will surely have its place in history beside that other day, eighty-live years ago, when George Stephenson drove the first railway locomotive between Stockton and Darlington. In the great square of the Brennan tor-' pedo factory at Gillingham, where the lighting-tops of battleships in the adjacent dockyard poise above the stone coping of the wall, there was a track laid down in a circle of a quarter of a mile. Switches linked it up with other lengths of track, a straight stretch down to a muddy cape of the Medway estuary, and a string of curves and loops coiling among the stone and iron factory sheds. The strange 'thing about it was that it was single—just one line of rail on sleepers tamped into the unstable “made” ground <of the place. And there was Brennan, his face red with the chill wind sweeping in from the Nore, his voice plaintive and Irish, discoursing. at slow length, of revolutions per minute, of “precession,” and the like. The journalists from London, who had come down at his invitation, fidgeted and shivered in the bitter morning air; the affair did not look in the least like an epoch in the history of transportation ami civilization, till — “Now, gentlemen,” said Brennan, and led the way across the circle of track. And then, from its home behind the low, powder-magazine-like sheds, there rode forth a strange car, the like of which was never seen before. It was painted the businesslike - slatyblue gray of the War Department. It was merely a flat platform, ten feet wide by forty long, with a steel cab mounted on its forward end, through the windows of which one could see a young engineer in tweeds standing against a blur of moving machine-parts. It ran on the single rail; its four wheels revolved in a line, one behind another; and it travelled with the level, flexible equilibrium of a ship moving across a dock. It swung over 'the sharp curves without faltering, crossed the switch, and floated—floated is the only word for the serene and equable quality of its movement—round and round the quarter-mile circle. A workman boarded it as it passed him, and'*sat on the edge with his legs swinging, and its level was unaltered. It was wonderful beyond words to see. It seemed to abolish the very principle of gravitation; it eontra-

dieted calmly one's most familial - instincts. ... . Every one knows the sense one gains at times while watching an ingenious machine at its work— a sense of being in the presence of a living and conscious thing, with more than the industry, the pertinacity, the dexterity, of a man. There was a moment, while watching Brennan's car, when one had to summon an effort of reason to do away with this sense of life; it answered each movement of the men on board and each inequality in the makeshift track with an adjustment of balance irresistibly suggestive of consciousness. It was an illustration of that troublous theorem which advances that consciousness is no more than the co-rclation of the parts of the brain, and that a machine adapted to its work is as conscious in its own sphere as a mind is in its sphere. The car backed round the track, crossed to the straight line, and halted to take us aboard. There were about forty of us, yet it took up our unequally distributed weight without disturbance. The young engineer threw over his lever, and we ran down the line. The movement was as “sweet” and equable as the movement of a powerful automobile running slowly on a smooth road; there was an utter absence of those jars and small lateral shocks that are inseparable from a ear running on a double track. We passed beyond the sheds and slid along a narrow spit of land thrusting out into the mud-flanked estuary. Men on lighters and a working-party of bluejackets turned to stare at the incredible machine with its load. Then back again, three times round the circle, and in and out among the curves, always with that unchanging stateliness of gait. As we spun round the circle, she leaned inward like a cyclist against the centrifugal pull. She needs ..no. banking-of the. track-to keep her on the rail. A line of rails to travel on, and - ground- that will carry her weight— she asks no more. With these and a clear road ahead, she is to abolish distance and revise the world’s schedules of time. “A hundred and twenty miles an hour,” I hear Brennan saying, in that sad. voice of his; “or maybe two hundred. That's a detail.” In the back of the eab were broad unglazed window’s, through which one could watch the tangle of machinery. Dynamos are bolted to the floor, purring

under their shields like comfortable cats; abaft of them a twenty-horse-power Wolseley petrol-engine supplies motive power for every thing. And above the dynamos, cased in studded leather, swinging a little in their ordered precession, are the two gyroscopes, the soul of the machine. To them she owes her equilibrium. Of all machines in the world, the gyroscope is the simplest, for, in its essential form, it is no more than a wheel revolving. But a wheel revolving is the vehicle of many physical principles, and the sum of them is that which is known as gyroscopic action. It is seen in the ordinary spinning top, which stands erect in its capacity of a gyroscope revolving horizontally.

making experimental machines tti scrapping them, of filing use Veps patents, of doubt and persistence. But the answer was found—in the spinning top. A spinning top set down so that it stands at an angle to the floor will right itself; it will rise till it stands upright on the point of equal friction. Brennan's resource, therefore, was to treat his gyroscope as a top. He enclosed it in a case, through which its axles projected, and at each side of the car he built stp - .,i brackets reaching forth a few inches below each end of the axle. The result is not difficult to deduce. When the car came to a curve, the cen-

The apparatus . that holds Brennan’s ear upright, and promises to revolutionize transportation, is a top adapted to a new purpose. It is a' gyroscope revolving in a perpendicular plane, a steel wheel weighing three quarters of a ton and spinning at the rate of three thousand revolutions to the minute. Now, the effect of gyroscope action is to resist any impulse that tends to move the revolving wheel out of the plane in which it revolves. This resistance'can be felt in a top; it can be felt much more strongly in the beautiful little gyroscopes of brass ami steel that are sold for the scientific demonstration of the laws governing revolving bodies. Such a one, only a few inches in size, will develop a surprising resistance. This resistance increases with the weight of the wheel and the speed at which it moves, till, with Brennan’s gyroscopes "of th/ee-quarters--'of a ton each /whirling in a vae.uum at three thousand revolutions per minute, it would need a weight. that would crush the car into the ground to throw them from their upright plane. When Brennan made his early models, he found that, while the little cars would, remain upright and run along a straight rail, they left the track ’at the first curve. The gyroscope governed their direction as'well as their equilibrium. It was the first eheck in the evolution of the perfect machine. It was over ten years before he found the? answer to the .problem—ten years of

trifugal action tended to throw it outward; the side of the car that was on the inside of the curve swung up andi the bracket touched the axle of the gyroscope. Forthwith, in the manner of its father, the top, the gyroscope tried to stand upright on the bracket;] all the weight of it and all its wonderful force were pressed on that side o£ the car, holding it down against the tendency to rise and capsize. The thing] was done; the spinning top had come to the rescue of its posterity. It only? remained to fit a double gyroscope, withi the wheels revolving in opposite directions, and, save for engineering details, the mono-rail car was evolved. Through the window in the back of the cab I was able to watch them at their work—not the actual gyroscopes, but their eases, quivering with the unimaginable velocity of the great wheels within, turning and tilting accurately to each shifting weight as the men on board moved here and there. Above them were the glass oil-cups, with the opal-green engine-oil flushing through them to feed the bearings. Lubrication is a vital part of the machine. Let that fail, and the axles, grinding and red-hot, would eat through the white metal of the bearings as a knife goes through butter. It is a thing that has been foreseen by the inventor: to the lubricating apparatus is affixed a danger signal that, would instantly warn the engineer. ‘"But,” says Brennan, “if one' broke down, the other gyroscope would hold

fcer up—till ye could run her to a siding, anyway." “But supposing the electric apparatus Bailed?” suggests a reporter—with visions of headlines, perhaps. “Supposing fche motor driving the gyroscopes broke flown; what then?” “They’d run for a couple of days, (With the momentum they’ve got,” answers the inventor. ; “And for two or three hours, that ’ud keep her upright by itself.” On the short track at Gillingham there are no gradients to show what the car

time, it is not amiss that a great inventor should stand.aloof from commerce. But, for all the cheerful matter-of-fact-ness of t'he man, he, too, has seen visions. There are times when he talks <of the future as he hopes it will be, as he means it to be, when “transportation is civilisation. Men ara to travel then on a single rail, in great cars like halls, two hundred feet long, thirty to forty feet wide, whirling across continents at two hundred miles an hour —from New York to San Francisco between dawn and dawn.

£Tlie axle-end (C) corresponds to the point of the top. If, in turning a curve, the car-body (I'") should commence to lean to the left, the projecting segment (G) would rise'and touch the axle (C) of the right shand balance-wheel. The balance-wheel would thereupon tend to rise at right angles with G. just -as a top tends to rise at right angles with the surface on which It spins. This action would counteract the leaning tendency of the car-body and restore the equilibrium of the car.

jean do in the way of climbing, but here again the inventor is positive. She will trim up a slope as steep las one in six, , he Bays. .There is no reason ;to doubt him; the .five-foot model .that, he used to exhibit 'could . climb ' steeper incl.iries, run along a rope stretched six feet above the ground, or remain at rest upon it while the rope was swung to and fro. - It would do all these things while carrying a" man ; and, for my part, I am willing to take Brennan’s word; - ;■ ‘ i > c Louis Brennan himself was by no means fhe least interesting featiire-of the demonstration. He has none of the look iof the visionary, this inan who has gone Ito war with time and space; neither.had George Stephenson. :He ; is short-, and thick-set," with'a full face, a heavy .moustache hiding his mouth,' and heayy, eyebrows; He is troubled a little, with asthma, which makes him somewhat staccato and breathless in speech, and perhaps also accentuates the peculiar plaintive quality of his Irish voice. There is nothing in his appearance to indicate whether he is thirty-five or fifty-five. lAs a matter of fact, he is two years over ithe latter age, but a man ripe in life, with that persistence and belief in his work which is to engineers what passion is to a poet. The technicalities of steel and iron come easily off his tongue; they are his native speech, in which he expresses himself most intimately. All Iris life ho has been concerned with machines. He is the inventor of the Brennan steerable torpedo, whoso adoption by tlie Admiralty made him rich and rendered possible the long years of study and experiment that went to the making of the mono-rail car. He lias a touch of the rich man’s complacency; it does not go ill with his kindly good humour and his single-heart-ed pride in his life work. It is characteristic, I think, of his (honesty of purpose and of the genius that is his driving force that hitherto he lias Concerned himself with scientific invention somewhat to the exclusion of the commercial aspects of his contrivance. He lias had help in money and men from ithe British Government, which likewise placed the torpedo factory at his disposal; and the governments of India and —of all places—Kashmir have granted him subsidies. Railroad men from all parts of 'the world have seen his model: but he has not been ardent in the hunt (for customers. Perhaps that will not be necessary; the mono-rail ear should u its own salesman: but, in the me«an-

Travel writ no longer be uncomfortable. These cars, equipped like a hotel. will sweep along with the motion of an iceyacht. They will not jolt over uneven places., or strain" to mount, the track at curves-: .in yaeh one,.the wearifejs gyroscopes will govern an unchanging equilibrium Trustflil Kashmir wiH advance

from its remoteness to a place accessible from anywhere. Streetcar lines will no longer be a perplexity to paving authorities and anathema to other traffic; a single rail will be flush with the

ground, out of the way of hoofs and tires. Automobiles will run on two wheels like a bicycle. It is to be a monorail world, soothed and assured by the drone of gyroscopes. By that time the patient ingenuity of inventors and engineers will have found the means to run Ithe gyroscopes at a greater speed than is now possible, thus rendering it feasible to use a smaller wheel. It is a dream based on good solid reasoning, backed by a great inventor’s careful calculations. Practical railroad men have given to the mono-rail car a sufficiently warm welcome. They have been impressed chiefly by its suitability to the conditions of transportation in the great new countries, as, for instance, on that line of railway that is creeping north from the Zambesi to open up the copper deposits of northwestern Rhodesia, and on through Central Africa to its 1 terminus at Cairo. Just such land as this helped

to inspire Brennan. He was a boy when he first saw the endless plains of Australia, and. out of that experience grew his first speculations about the future of railway travel. Such lauds make

positive and clear demands, if ever they] sire to be exploited for their full value to humanity. They need railways quickly] laid and cheaply constructed; lines not too exacting in point of curves and grar dien'ts; and, finally, fast travel. . ;