Elmer Sperry

Elmer Sperry's mother died of complications from his birth in October 1860, on a small farm in Cincinnatus, New York, and he was raised by his father and relatives. He built his first dynamo as a teenager and lasted only a year at Cornell, in 1878 and 1879, before deciding a workshop taught him more than a classroom did. At nineteen, with borrowed money, he started his first company, wiring arc lights for a mining town. Six more companies followed over the next three decades, none of them permanent, each abandoned once its problem interested him less than the next one: mining machinery, electric cars, storage batteries, chemical processes. By his forties he had made and lost several small fortunes and moved on from every one of them.

Sperry spent three decades restlessly founding companies before he found the problem that made him famous: keeping a ship, or an airplane, pointed the way it was supposed to go without a person correcting it constantly. His gyrocompass, developed after 1908 and tested aboard the battleship USS Delaware in 1911, used a spinning wheel instead of a magnet to find true north, immune to the metal hulls that threw off ordinary compasses. He founded the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Brooklyn in 1910, then built a gyroscopic ship stabilizer and, with his son Lawrence, an aircraft gyrostabilizer that won France's Aero Club safety prize in 1914 and the Collier Trophy twice. By 1918 the same technology had become a radio-guided aerial torpedo, an early ancestor of the cruise missile. He sold the company in January 1929, a year before he died.

The compass's German rival, Hermann Anschutz-Kaempfe, sued Sperry for patent infringement after Sperry sold gyrocompasses to Germany's own navy on the eve of World War I, and the case dragged through Berlin's courts with Albert Einstein testifying as the court's technical expert. Einstein's analysis favored Anschutz-Kaempfe, and Sperry lost in Germany even as his patent held in the United States and Britain — a reminder that the same physics could be judged two different ways depending on whose courts, and whose war, were doing the judging. The costlier loss came in December 1923, when his son and closest collaborator, Lawrence, who had helped build the gyrostabilizer and invented the aircraft autopilot as a teenager, died at thirty-one when the plane he was testing went down over the English Channel.

Sperry's instruments outlived every specific machine he built them for. The gyrocompass became standard equipment on naval and merchant ships worldwide, the autopilot and gyro horizon became fixtures of every cockpit built afterward, and the company he sold in 1929 eventually folded into Sperry Rand and, later, Unisys — an unlikely lineage running from shipboard gyroscopes to mainframe computers. The Elmer A. Sperry Award, established in 1955 and given jointly by five engineering societies, still recognizes advances in transportation engineering each year. He is remembered less for one famous invention than for a habit of mind: building machinery that corrected its own course, quietly, without a person at the wheel.

Elmer Sperry's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Sperry Gyroscope Company company
  Founded in Brooklyn to build and sell his gyroscopic inventions 1910
• Gyrocompass invention
  Tested aboard USS Delaware, later adopted by navies worldwide 1911
• Gyroscopic ship stabilizer invention
  Used a wave-sensing gyroscope to reduce a ship's rolling 1912
• Aircraft gyrostabilizer invention
  Developed with son Lawrence Sperry, foundation of the later autopilot 1914
• Hewitt-Sperry Automatic Airplane invention
  Radio-guided unmanned aircraft, an early precursor of the cruise missile 1916

• October 12, 1860 aged 0 Born in Cincinnatus, New York, his mother dying of complications from the birth
• 1878-1879 aged ~19 Spends a year at Cornell studying dynamos before leaving without a degree
• 1880 aged ~20 Founds the Sperry Electric Company in Chicago at nineteen
• June 28, 1887 aged 26 Marries Zula Augusta Goodman in Chicago
• 1910 aged ~50 Founds the Sperry Gyroscope Company in Brooklyn
• 1911 aged ~51 The gyrocompass is tested aboard the battleship USS Delaware
• 1915 aged ~55 Loses a gyrocompass patent suit in Germany after Albert Einstein testifies against him His patent held in the United States and Britain regardless.
• December 1923 aged 63 His son Lawrence Sperry dies testing an aircraft over the English Channel
• June 16, 1930 aged 69 Dies in Brooklyn from complications of gallstone surgery

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