Do you remember we talked about the wonderful two-wheeled car of Count Shilovsky? It turns out that our brilliant compatriot had the idea of introducing gyroscopes on the railway. Yes, exactly the creation of monorail tracks along which strange, but faster trains would run. But the most interesting thing is that he was not the first! It turns out that a few years before him, a certain Louis Brennan patented his monorail with a gyroscope.
In general, Brennan is a fairly well-known inventor. In 1880 he, having arrived from Australia to England, offered the British Admiralty a guided torpedo he had created. This invention brought him a colossal amount - about one hundred thousand pounds. This is what allowed Brennan to continue to develop his favorite brainchild - a vehicle with gyroscopic stabilization. And in 1903 he patents the monorail railway.
He builds two working prototypes for his money and gives a series of presentations that have a strong impact. And the British military department is again interested in the invention, and allocates the amount for further research. And the second demonstration brings Brennan a lot of grants, for which he builds an already full-size locomotive. Twelve meters long, the locomotive was equipped with a twenty-horsepower gasoline engine. The maximum speed was thirty-five km / h.
On the constructed section of the road, in mid-October 1909, Brennan's locomotive transported thirty participants in the experiment: military, journalists and industrialists from start to finish without incidents or breakdowns. And the young Winston Churchill, built for the 1910 London technical exhibition, took a ride.
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It would seem that everything was going great, but … no matter how promising the idea of a monorail road seemed from the economic point of view (one rail against two, simplicity of switch structures, high-speed qualities with the same carrying capacity …), the drawbacks remained insoluble.
And they were like this: a locomotive with a gyroscope had to always work, otherwise it would simply fall. And the stops did not save, they were very uncomfortable. This also led to difficulties in arranging the depot and aprons. Well, the time it takes to spin the gyroscope.
As a result, the conservative, customary and already laid two-track routes won. And Brennan continued to invent stabilization systems, only now for aircraft and he succeeded there too. But, unfortunately, progress killed him in the literal sense: in the winter of 1932, the inventor was hit by a car.
The second model of Louis Brennan's gyro, known from the pictures of Louis riding his daughter on it, is still preserved and stored in the London Science Museum.